A History of Classical Sociology

STUDENT'S LIBRARY
ee

A History
of Classical
Sociology

Edited by Prof 1. S. Kon
Translated by H. Campbell Creighton, M.A. (Oxon)

Y

PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW

Student's Library

Editorial Board: F.M. Volkov (Managing Editor), Ye. F. Gubsky
(Deputy Managing Editor), V. G. Afanasyev, Taufik Ibrahim, Zafar Imam,
1.8. Kon, I. M. Krivoguz, A. V. Petrovsky, Yu. N. Popov, Munis Reza,
N. V. Romanovsky, V. A. Tumanov, A. G. Zdravomyslov, V. D. Zotov
KonnekTHs asTopos (ore. pedaxrop H. C. Kon)

Mctopua couvonornn XiX-nayana XX Beka

Ha an2zaulicKom a30iKe

© H3natrenscrso «HayKa», 1979
English translation © Progress Publishers 1989
Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

v1 0302000000- 243

o14c01) sy 89

ISBN S—01—001102-6

CONTENTS

Page
Introduction (by Igor Kon). ... 0.0.0.0... . 000 cece eee 5
1. From Social Philosophy to Sociology (by Igor Kon)... 9

2. Auguste Comte and the Ongin of Positivist Sociology
(by Elena Osipova) 2.6006 os ce eee ee ews 22

3. Herbert Spencer’s Sociological Conception (by Jgor
RON) OSes ca RUSS arco ee bo rend eee Oi 43

4. Naturalism in Sociology of the Turn of the Century
(by Alexander Hofman and Alexander Kovalev) ..... 57

5. The Psychological Sociology of the Turn of the Century
(bY Igor Kon) «. 3-Fea0% Tae pity ve ie EE es 96

6. Empirical Social Studies in the Nineteenth Century
(by Marina Kovaleva)... 0.6.0.6 .0 0c eee eee 122

7. The Crisis of Evolutionism and the Antipositivist

Trends in Sociology at the Turn of the Century (by
IOP ROM) v4 es bol At 8 A EERE OR EA 151

8. Ferdinand Ténnies’ Sociological Conception (by
Leonid TOnin) ois6c ae 6. UR SR ee arena 173
9. Georg Simmel’s Sociology (by Leonid Ionin) ....... 189
10. Emile Durkheim’s Sociology (by Elena Osipova)..... 206
11. The Sociology of Max Weber (by Piama Haidenko) . . . 255

12. The Sociological System of Vilfredo Pareto (by Elena
OSIDOVG): & cacaiats Mocs S oleed Ene Ei eres at cM arelds We, Sele 312

13. Sociology in Prerevolutionary Russia (by Igor Golo-
$CNKO) 6% sintea ye dab Hedd B DRS 28S ote Rare ee es 337
Conclusion (by Igor Kon)... 0... 0. eee eee 357

Subjet Index: 24.543 seus 5 ow ee RA ee a et
Name Index 3.0 vice i crace whereas Mae Rat

INTRODUCTION

Igor Kon

A necessary element of any science’s self-awareness is its his-
tory. By tracing the historical development of their disciplines
scholars and scientists understand their contemporary state
and their contradictions and problems better. Not surprisingly,
interest in the history of a science grows as the latter develops.
And that fully applies to sociology.

In contrast to the natural sciences, sociology’s own history
is not a side issue but a serious problem studied by the same
methodological means (including quantitative procedures) as
other social problems.

Of late, the proportion of historical sociological studies in
the sociological literature has risen considerably. And its themes
have broadened. Alongside the history of sociological theory
there has arisen the history of empirical sociology, and much
attention has begun to be paid to the history of the institu-
tionalisation of sociology and to study of its social functions
and of its relations with other sciences.

In 1970, at the Seventh World Sociological Congress, a
research committee on the history of sociology was set up on
the initiative of the Soviet delegates within the International
Sociological Association. In 1978 publication began in the
United States of a special journal on the history of sociology.
Matters of its history now have a notable place in the pro-
ceedings of international sociological congresses and symposia
on the history of science.

There are great difficulties, however, in the way of develop-

5

————

ing a scientific history of sociology. The history of any science
includes the history of the forming of its subject-matter,
methods, conceptual apparatus, inner logical structures, the
sphere of its practical application, its institutionalisation and
relations with other disciplines, and the relations of the various
schools and currents in the science itself. But interdisciplinary
boundaries are mobile and shifting. Even today the subject-
matter of sociology is by no means defined in an identical way.
And unity has been impossible, furthermore, throughout its
history. An author’s ideological and theoretical stance, and his
understanding of the contemporaneous state of sociology,
also affect his historical conceptions. The very principles of the
structure and periodisation of the history of sociology is very
different with different writers.

Without going into the historiography of the subject, which
still awaits study, one can list a number of principles underly-
ing monographs and courses in the history of sociology:

(1)a simple exposition of the views of various sociologists
and schools in chronological order, with a minimum of analysis
of their content;}

(2) organisation of the material on a space-time principle,
i.e., by separate countries and periods;?

(3) examination of sociological ideas and theories as an
aspect and element of a broader history of socio-political
thought on a background of changes in socio-economic, polit-
ical, and ideological attitudes?

(4) the history of the succession and development of so-
ciological theory as a specialised system of knowledge, the
various currents of sociological thought being treated either
as a stage in the moulding and preparation of an author’s
own conceptions, or as alternative, mutually supplementing
streams:4

(5) a history of the shaping or manifestation in sociology of
some definite, quite general philosophical orientation, for
example, positivism;*

(6)the history of the evolution of certain fundamental
sociological categories, whose content and functions have
changed in the various stages of society’s development;®

(7) a series of monographic essays on outstanding sociologists
of the past, each being studied in relation to the features of his

6

time, personality, and scientific activity, and in a certain histor-
ical perspective;”

(8)a series of essays on separate, most important concrete
studies, tracing the evolution of the relationship of theoretical
conceptions and empirical methods of research;*

(9) the biographical approach, in which the content of so-
ciological conceptions is deduced from a sociologist’s personal
features and life;?

(10) the history of empirical social studies, with reliance
on the development of the methodology and technique of
research;)°

(11) the history of the institutionalisation of sociology and
its conversion into a university discipline, the founding and
development of scientific institutions, university chairs,
journals, etc.;'?

(12)a retrospective analysis of certain very important
contemporary problems as they have been posed by major
sociologists of the past.!?

In the present volume we trace the forming and development
of non-Marxian sociology in Western Europe, the USA, and
Russia in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. This, of
course, is thematically, chronologically, and geographically
incomplete, but such a division of the subject seems legitimate
to us since the period singled out was specially important for
the establishing of sociology as an idependent science, while
the most intensive development of Marxist sociology took place
later in the post-1917 period and needs to be treated in a sep-
arate volume.

The authors hope that these essays on the history of so-
ciology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the
West and in pre-revolutionary Russia, written from a Marxian
standpoint, will interest readers in the West.

Notes

1 V_ I. Lenin. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. In: Collected Works
(Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), Vol. 14.

2 Heinz Maus. A Short History of Sociology (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, London, 1962); G. Duncan Mitchell. A Hundred Years of Sociology
(Duckworth, London, 1968).

3 Jan Szczepanski. Socjologia. Rozw6j Problematyki i Metod (Panstw.
Wydawn. Naukowe, Warsaw, 1969); Howard Becker and H. E. Bares.
Social Thought from Lore to Science, Vol. 3. (Dover Publications, New
York, 1961).

* Nicholas S. Timasheff, Sociological Theory, Its Nature and Growth,
3rd ed. (Doubleday, New York, 1955); Talcott Parsons. The Structure of
Social Action, 2nd ed, (The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1949); Don A. Mar-
tindale. The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (Houghton & Mif-
flin, Boston, Mass., 1960).

5 ].S.Kon. Der Positivismus in der Soziologie (Akademie-Verlag,
Berlin, 1968); Anthony Giddens, Positivism and Sociology (Heinemann,
London, 1974).

* Robert A. Nisbet. The Sociological Tradition (Basic Books, New
York, 1966).

7 Lewis A. Coser. Masters of Sociological Thought. Ideas in Historical
and Social Context, 2nd ed. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York,
1977); Franco Ferrarotti. /1 Pensiero Sociologico da Auguste Comte a
Max Horkheimer (Milan, 1974); Gianfranco Poggi. Images of Society.
Essays on the Sociological Theories of Tocqueville, Marx and Durkheim
(Stanford U.P., Stanford, Cal., 1972).

® John Madge. The Origins of Scientific Sociology (Tavistock Publica-
tions, London, 1970).

° Arthur Mitzman. Iron Cage. An Historical Interpretation of Max
Weber (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970).

*® Bernard Lécuyer and Anthony R. Oberschall‘‘The Early History of
Social Research”. In: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,
Vol. 15 (The Macmillan Co., and The Free Press, New York, 1968),
pp. 36-53.

1 Terry Nichols Clark. Prophets and Patrons: The French University
and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Harvard U.P., Cambridge,
Mass., 1973); A. Oberschall (Ed.). The Establishment of Empirical So-
ciology. Studies in Continuity, Discontinuity, and Institutionalisation
(Harper & Row, New York, 1972).

'? Luciano Cavalli. J] Mutamento Sociale. Sette Ricerche sulla Civilitd
Occidentale, 2nd ed. (11 Mulino, Bologna, 1971).

1
FROM SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY TO SOCIOLOGY

Igor Kon

1. The Ideological and Theoretical Premisses of
Sociological Knowledge

Sociology arose in the middle of the nineteenth century as an
independent science of the patterns of development and func-
tioning of social systems, not because a new object of study had
appeared, but because problems had developed in other social
sciences that could not be tackled by the traditional means and
within the bounds of the existing system of knowledge.

The sociological vision of the world (or sociological style of
thinking) presupposes (1) a view of society as a systemic whole
functioning and developing according to its own laws, ‘and not
as something mechanically concatenated and therefore per-
mitting all sorts of arbitrary combinations of separate social
elements’;! (2) a conscious stance on study of actually existing
social relations in contrast to the utopian constructing of
an ideal social system; (3) reliance on empirical methods of
research (although the understanding of these methods may
differ) in contrast to speculative philosophical constructs.

The elements of this approach were built up gradually within
the context of social philosophy and the philosophy of the
history of modern times, and as empirical studies and the dif-
ferentiation of social and humanitarian sciences developed (the
process being strongly affected, moreover, by a powerful flow
to the social sciences from the natural sciences).

The problem of society as a system had already been posed
by seventeenth-century theories of ‘social physics’. Insofar as
society was represented as part of nature, social science became
methodologically a part of natural science. While the stellar
world was depicted in these theories as a mechanical interaction
of celestial bodies, society was regarded as a kind of astronom-
ical system of individuals connected by social attraction and
repulsion.

The ‘natural theory of society’ was rationalistic. Its aim was
not to describe social facts but to reduce them to a small
number of general laws immanent in nature (including the na-
ture of man) the validity of which raised no doubts. The think-
ers of the seventeenth century, having taken mathematics
(geometric method), astronomy, and mechanics, as the model of
science, endeavoured to make broad, deductive constructs, and
treated not only history scornfully but also social statistics
(which was making its first significant advances at that time).

The social philosophy of the eighteenth century, which was
orientated to Newtonian physics rather than to astronomy and
geometry, was already not so mechanistic and was more careful
about its generalisations.

Mediaeval philosophy and its ideological heirs (Romantic
traditionalists) represented society as an organic whole, as a
community in which socio-economic ties were inseparable from
moral ones and were personified and hallowed by traditions and
religion. The Enlighteners counterposed to that idealised image
of mediaeval ‘communalness’ a ‘mechanistic’ model of society
based on division of labour and rational exchange between
individuals. The likening of society to a machine that constitut-
ed a kind of structural equivalent of philosophical-historical
Crusoism was naive and in the final analysis idealist. But it
opened up a possibility of analytical singling out and clarifica-
tion of the real functions of separate social institutions and
subsystems (the state, law, the economy, culture) which had
hardly been differentiated in the ‘organic’ model.

The difference between socicty and the state was first of
all clarified. The first step toward that had already been made
by the theorists of ‘natural law’ and of the contract origin of
the state. For all the idealist character of their views the delimi-
tation of the ‘natural’ social structure and ‘artificial’ legal estab-

lishments opened the way to understanding of the nondepend-
ence of business and economic affairs on politics.

The English materialists of the seventeenth century (Thomas
Hobbes, John Locke), the Scottish moralists (David Hume,
Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson), and the French materialists of
the eighteenth century (Holbach, Helvetius) were in accord in
considering human behaviour as egoistic in principle, directed
to attaining some personal advantage. But it was only a step
from reducing the motives of the social behaviour of the indivi-
dual or group to the interests of the latter to establishing the
dependence of those interests on the individual’s or group’s real
socio-economic position. The thesis of the clash of social in-
terests led logically to a conclusion about the non-correlativity
or incompatibility of the conscious motives of individual ac-
tions and their social results. The Scottish moralists stressed that
people’s social behaviour, not to mention its results, was de-
cisively governed by irrational, instinctive forces and inclina-
tions, and that people’s deeds, while interweaving and clashing,
generated results quite indeterminate and unexpected for all
the parties of this interaction. From that it followed that the
structure and dynamics of the social whole could be explained
without their being correlated with the consciousness of the
individuals comprising this whole, politicians included. As
a result the postulate of a “social contract”, necessary for
awareness of the human (and not divine) nature of authority,
itself became superfluous and was subjected to sharp criticism.

The Physiocrats, thanks to whom “political economy...
was raised to the rank of a special science”,’ started consciously
from the principle of the autonomy of economic affairs as
regards law, suggesting that the spontaneous play of economic
forces led more truly and surely to socially useful results than
administrative, bureaucratic measures.

Clarification of the significance of economic property rela-
tions led social thought, beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau,
to the problem of class differences and the functional role of
social inequality. The English classical economists deduced the
social division of society from the social division of labour. This
led, at the end of the eighteenth century, to the concept ‘class’
coming into use, which did not coincide with the concept
‘estate’ in use until then. Augustin Thierry, the French historian

11

a a ee

of the Restoration period, made the concept of class struggie
popular. Although the new terms did not yet have the strict
meaning they have received in Marxism, they clearly implied a
new social structure based primarily on property differences
rather than on mediaeval estates.

The ‘real’ world of spontaneously shaped social relations
came to be called civil society in contrast to the world of polit-
ical and legal relations. That was linked terminologically with
the traditional difference between civil (private) law and public
law. But Hegel had already examined this matter more deeply,
seeing civil society as simultaneously united (since no individual
could get along in such a society without others), and divided,
torn by contradictory selfish interests. And since he stressed
that civil society was not always sharply counterposed every-
where to political society proper, but only in ‘modern’ epoch,
the term also acquired a historical sense signifying, on the one
hand, a certain sphere, a part of the social whole, and, on the
other hand, capitalist society as a stage of historical develop-
ment.

The attempt made by Vico at a conceptual delimitation of
society and culture, and the Enlighteners’ development of the
idea of progress were very important achievements of eigh-
teenth-century philosophy.

The Enlighteners’ theory of progress, which played the role
of the ideological foundation of the capitalist, bourgeois epoch,
largely paved the way for the evolutionist schemes of the nine-
teenth century. But the linear conception of social development
often took on a frankly teleological character: the goal postulat-
ed by the philosopher in fact played the role of the Providence.
In addition, the establishing of profound social changes was
harmonised at every step with the principle of the invariance of
‘human nature’, treated in an anthropological spirit.

In its application to historical material the idea of ‘eternal,
immutable’ laws was very shaky. Attempts to explain both the
general structure of society, and its concrete state at a certain
moment of time, by one and the same formula, inevitably
failed, while the identification of the concepts of social change,
development, and progress created an illusion of the movement
of history along a predetermined route.

Thus, although the social philosophy of modern times de-

12

veloped important theoretical problems, its constructs proved to
be speculative and unspecific. But, parallel with the speculative
philosophy of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, empirical social studies began to develop, above all social
statistics. These investigations, arising from the practical needs
of government, were originally local, imperfect in methods, and
different in various countries.* But they gradually gathered
scope and force. In France the technique of mass statistical
surveys and economic censuses was developed. The English
‘political arithmeticians’ of the seventeenth century, William
Petty, John Graunt, Gregory King, and Edmund Halley, laid the
foundations of modern demography and worked out methods
of quantitative investigation of social patterns.

Looked at separately, the empirical studies of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries seem only descriptive, without
a general theoretical basis. But in default of a sociological
theory these investigations were based on the conceptions of
natural science and general philosophy. It is characteristic that
there were many outstanding natural scientists among the
founders of empirical sociology (for example, Halley, Laplace,
Buffon, and Lavoisier), whose study of social processes was
organically linked with their scientific activity.

These scientists did not simply ‘apply’ the ready-made
methods developed in the natural sciences to the study of social
problems; many general scientific methods and theories were
developed in fact on social material. Laplace’s Essai philoso-
phique sur les probabilités (1814), for instance, was largely the
result of a sociodemographic study by himself and his col-
leagues. A desire to get a rigorous mathematical formula of
population growth explains the popularity of Malthus’ Essay
on Population (1798) to no small extent, in spite of the clearly
reactionary character and unsoundness of his theory.

In addition to social statistics the development of ethno-
graphic studies at the end of the eighteenth and in the early
nineteenth centuries had great significance for sociology. The
‘savage world’ discovered by the first historians, travellers,
and settlers was not so much just an object of study as an object
of influence. But the Enlighteners’ theories about ‘natural man’
stimulated a more and more active comparison of ‘civilised
morals’ and ‘savage’; the savage was now primitive man in whom

13

> a or

Europeans could recognise features of their own history.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the word ‘anthropol-
ogy’ still belonged to the lexicon of anatomy and meant ‘study
of the human body’. But Buffon was already defining it as the
general science of human kind (including linguistics, study of
cultures, etc., in it).

The first attempts at a systematic description and com-
parison of the ways of life of various nations (often with a
historical twist) were made in the eighteenth century (Joseph
Lafitau, Francois de Volney). Speculative philosophical con-
structs continually clashed as a result with checked and record-
ed scientific facts that indicated the complexity of the problem
of the unity and diversity of human culture.

The comparative historical method was being applied not
only to study of ‘primitive’ peoples but also to jurisprudence,
folklore, and linguistics.

In the early nineteenth century speculative social philosophy
was everywhere being counterposed by the idea of scientific
‘positive’ investigation. The differentiating and ‘hiving off
of scientific disciplines itself was also accelerated. Hard on
the heels of jurisprudence and history, political economy,
ethnography, statistics, and linguistics were separated off from
philosophy. That was a model and precedent for the rise of new
disciplines, and at the same time increased the need for some
new intellectual synthesis and a generalising, but at the same
time non-philosophical (in the sense of non-speculative) science
of man and society.

2. The Social and Class Premisses of Sociology

The birth of sociology was also linked with certain social needs.
Just as the social philosophy of the Enlighteners reflected the
breaking-up of the feudal order and the rise of a new, capitalist
society (which it anticipated in many ways), sociology arose as
a reflection of the inner antagonisms of capitalist society and
the social and political struggles generated by it.

The early nineteenth century was a period not only of
stormy growth of capitalism, but also of the first clear display
of its contradictions. The growth of industry and of towns was

1A

accompanied with mass ruin of the peasantry, handicraftsmen
and artisans, and of small property owners. The extremely hard
conditions of factory work and of the workers’ life contrasted
sharply with the growth of the bourgeoisie’s wealth, provoking
a sharpening of class struggle. The uprising of the Lyon weavers
in France, the Luddite movement in England, and later Char-
tism, were evidence of the entry into the arena of a new social
class, the proletariat. Disillusionment with the results of the
bourgeois revolution and the ‘Kingdom of Reason’ proclaimed
by it swept broad strata of the intellectuals. The lost illusions
were succeeded by bitter scepticism; the need for a realistic
analysis and evaluation of existing society, and of its past,
present, and future, was intensified .

The mode of that analysis depended on the thinker’s class
position. In the first third of the nineteenth century, three
main orientations, and correspondingly three groups of thinkers,
became clearly outlined in the socio-political thought of Western
Europe: conservative traditionalists, bourgeois liberal utili-
tarians, and utopian socialists, who not only embodied different
intellectual traditions but also expressed the interests of dif-
ferent social classes.

The conservative traditionalists (also called reactionary
romantics), like Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Louis de Bonald
(1754-1840), and Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821), held a frankly
negative position in regard to the French Revolution of 1789
and its results. They associated the post-revolutionary develop-
ment with chaos and destruction, which they counterposed to
an idealised harmony and order of the feudal Middle Ages and
prerevolutionary times. Hence their polemic against the ideas
of the Enlightenment and the specific theory of society .*

In opposition to the individualism and social nominalism
of the Enlightenment, which treated society as the result of
interactions between individuals, the traditionalists regarded
society as an organic whole with its own internal laws rooted
in its remote past. Society not only preceded the individual
historically, but also stood above him morally. Man’s existence
was impossible in principle without society, which moulded
him, in the direct sense of the term, only for its own ends.
Society did not consist of individuals but of relations and
institutions in which each person was allotted a certain function

1

or role. Since all parts of this whole were organically inter-
connected and interdependent, a change in any of them inevit-
ably disturbed the stability of the whole social system.

Satisfaction of fundamental, immutable human needs under-
lay the functions of social institutions. Disruption or weaken-
ing of the activity of any social institution therefore inevitably
caused a disordering and disorganisation of the corresponding
functions. It proved nothing that the social function of any
institution or belief was harmful. Even prejudices sometimes
performed a useful social role, uniting a group and strengthening
its members’ sense of safety and reliability. It was specially
necessary for the stability of society to maintain those groups
and institutions by which the individual was linked with other
people and with society as a whole. Urbanisation, industrialisa-
tion, and commerce, which were undermining these traditional
foundations of social being, did not lead to a higher form of
social organisation but to social and moral disintegration.

The reactionary ideological sense of that conception, which
retrospectively justified and substantiated any ‘historical’
determinations, is obvious. But it is also indisputable that the
traditionalists anticipated many later sociological conceptions
aimed at bringing out the inner relationships of the social whole.

Whereas the traditionalists regarded society as an organic
whole that had to be understood in order to adapt to it better,
the liberals saw in it an ‘artificial body’, a more or less me-
chanical aggregate of parts that could be altered and improved
by people’s conscious activity. Priority was definitely given
to the individual methodologically, if not ontologically . Metho-
dological individualism was closely linked with a programme of
laissez-faire, directed against guild and sectional regulation and
regimentation, and feudal, bureaucratic arbitrariness, etc. The
existence of any social institution was justified solely by its
usefulness.

But what benefit precisely should be made the cornerstone
of the appraisal of social institutions? The benefit of society?
Or of the separate individual? Or of certain definite social
groups and classes? While the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary
class and objectively expressed the interests of the majority
of the population, these questions were not so urgent. Holbach
and Helvetius could still suggest that personal interest correctly

16

understood automatically included concern for the social whole.
But English authors, who were more closely observing the es-
tablishing and development of capitalist relations, had already
seen the contradictoriness of this development in the eighteenth
century.

The further development of capitalism fostered a polarisa-
tion of scholars’ class positions. In the theories of the English
utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and James Mill
(1773-1836), social interest was wholly reduced to the sum
total of private interests; ‘the bourgeoisie is no longer presented
as a special class, but as the class whose conditions of existence
are those of the whole society’.’ Society, for Bentham, was a
fictitious body made up of individuals who were regarded as its
constituent members. While putting forward the principle of
achieving the maximum good for the greatest number as a
general ethical law, he at the same time considered socially
normal and morally acceptable when people strove to achieve
their own private interests, even when that did harm to others.
The utilitarian doctrine was converted

into a mere apologia for the existing state of affairs, an attempt to
prove that under existing conditions the mutual relations of people
today are the most advantageous and generally useful.®

While recognising the possibility of partial improvement and
reform of the existing society, bourgeois liberalism resolutely
opposed every kind of innovation of a revolutionary character;
and the idea of social evolution, from having been a means of
condemning feudalism, became a means of justifying already
victorious capitalism.

Social thinking did not develop just within the framework of
bourgeois ideology. The utopian socialism of Saint-Simon,
Fourier, and Robert Owen was also based on a definite social
philosophy on whose banner were the demands of scientific
character, sobriety, and positiveness. The works of Saint-Simon
(1760-1825) were particularly important on that plane.

In his Mémoire sur la science de lhomme (Note on the
Science of Man), 1813, which largely anticipated the path of
development of social thought, Saint-Simon remarked that
‘there has not been a science of man up to the present, only a

17
2-1147

Se a ee ee

conjectural science’, and proposed to give it ‘the stamp of the
observational sciences’,’ to give ‘the science of man a positive
character by basing it on observations and by treating it by the
method employed for other branches of physics’.® As a coun-
terweight to speculative philosophical constructs he proposed
‘to occupy himself in all parts of his work in establishing the
series of facts, being persuaded that this is the only solid part of
our knowledge’.?

But utopian socialism was incompatible in principle with
scientific investigation.

The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticised the existing capi-
talistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not
explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It
could only simply reject them as bad [Frederick Engels wrote]. The
more strongly this earlier socialism denounced the exploitation of
the working class, inevitable under capitalism, the less able was it
clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it

arose. a

The real revolution in the science of society, which laid the
foundation of scientific sociology, was made by Marx and
Engels.

Just as Darwin put an end to the view of animal and plant species
being unconnected, fortuitous, ‘created by God’ and immutable,
and was the first to put biology on an absolutely scientific basis by
establishing the mutability and the succession of species, so Marx
put an end to the view of society being a mechanical aggregation of
individuals which allows of all sorts of modification at the will of
the authorities (or, if you like, at the will of society and the govern-
ment) and which emerges and changes casually, and was the first to
put sociology on a scientific basis by establishing the concept of the
economic formation of society as the sum-total of given production
relations, by establishing the fact that the development of such
formations is a process of natural history.! :

The similarity of the theories of Marx and Darwin noted by
Lenin consisted in their both being, on the one hand, theories
of the historical development of nature and society and, on the

18

other, theories of the functioning of systems.

The materialist understanding of history was hostile, right
from the start, to speculative, history-of-philosophy constructs;
it developed in very close connection with study of concrete
social processes and of the history of society. ‘We wish to con-
struct our exposition solely on factual material, endeavouring,
as far as we can, to present only facts in a general form,’ Marx
wrote.!? But purely descriptive investigations satisfied him just
as little as abstract metaphysics.

Crass empiricism turns into false metaphysics, scholasticism, which
toils painfully to deduce undeniable empirical phenomena by simple
formal abstraction directly from the general law, or to show by
unig argument that they are in accordance with that law [he
wrote].

While rejecting the reification of ‘social forces’ and ‘essences’
typical of idealist philosophy, Marx stressed that people were at
once actors and authors of their world-historical drama, and
that the structure of society coincided in that sense with the
structure of their joint, combined activity. But these were not
the abstract individuals, taken separately, who figured in the
Robinson Crusoes of the eighteenth century, but individuals
who found themselves in a definite, historically concrete system
of social relations.

The understanding of society as a whole, law-governed,
innerly connected system entails the principle of objective
scientific investigation:

Its task [Engels wrote} was no longer to manufacture a system of
society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic
succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism
had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions
thus created the means of ending the conflict.14

But, in opposition to the traditionalist and positivist kowtow-
ing to ‘facts’, including the ‘wholeness’ of the social system,
Marx initially fixed its inner contradictions. The stability of a
social system described in structural terms was only a moment
in a more general process of historical development. Any
systems model of society required historical concretisation, and
it was impossible to understand the laws of the development

19
2*

and functioning of a specific society, ‘by using as one’s master
key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue
of which consists in being supra-historical’.15

While stressing the leading role of material production in the
development of society, Marx was, at the same time, far from a
theory of social automatism. It was not simply a matter of
recognising the ‘feedback’ of ideas on the economy; in deducing
the social division of society and its class structure from the
economy, above all from property relations, Marx showed that
this determination was ambiguous, and that different potentials
of development were inherent in one and the same society and
were displayed in the interests of different social classes and
realised in their activity. Recognition of class struggle as the
driving force of history took sociological theory out of the
framework of structural-functional relations between separate
social institutions and standards, and brought to the fore the
problem of the subject of social action, and evaluation of its
real opportunities. Sociology thus became an element and the
theoretical foundation of scientific socialism.

Lenin, calling the materialist understanding of history ‘a
synonym for social science’,'® wrote that ‘this hypothesis for
the first time made a scientific sociology possible’.17 The
principles of the materialist conception of history were bril-
liantly applied by Marx and Engels to investigation of capitalist
society as a whole, and to a number of partial social objects.
‘Now,’ Lenin wrote, ‘since the appearance of Capital—the ma-
terialist conception of history is no longer a hypothesis, but a
scientifically proven proposition.” ®

Separate aspects of Marx’s and Engels’ sociological concep-
tion were developed further and concretised in the works of
Plekhanov, August Bebel, the early Kautsky, and Labriola. And
Lenin made a colossal contribution to a Marxist sociology.

Both the theoretical-methodological and ideological prin-
ciples of Marxian sociology were unacceptable to the ideologists
of the capitalist class. At the same time the dominant class
needed a certain dose of sociological realism so as to explain

social processes, and concrete empirical information on various |

aspects of social life, since it would otherwise become increas-
ingly difficult to govern society. But the sociological theories
that the bourgeoisie needed had to be such as not to threaten

20

|

|

the foundations of the capitalist order. Sociology was created as
an alternative to socialism. Positivism became its philosophical
and methodological basis.

Notes

1 Vv. I. Lenin. What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They
Fight the Social-Democrats. Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1986), p 165.

2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology (Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1976), p 436.

3 Bernard Lécuyer and Anthony R. Oberschall. The Early History of
Social Research. In: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
(David L. Sills, Editor), Vol. 15 (The Macmillan Co., and The Free Press,
New York, 1968), pp 36-53.

“ For more details see: Irving M. Zeitlin. Ideology and the Develop-
ment of Sociological Theory (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1968), pp 54-55.

5 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Op.cit., p 437.

§ [bid., pp 437-438.

7 Oeuvres choisies de C.-H. de Saint-Simon (Van Meenen et cle,
Brussels, 1859), p 100.

® Ibid., p 144.

® Ibid., p 18.

1° Frederick Engels. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1978), p 57.

11 V_ I. Lenin. Op.cit., p 142.

'? Karl Marx. Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel. In:
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1986), p 343.

'3 Karl Marx. Theories of Surplus- Value, Part I (Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1978), p 89.

14 Frederick Engels, Op.cit., p 132.

‘5 Marx to the Editorial Board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski. In:
K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1982), p 294.

'6 VI. Lenin. Op.cit., p 142.

17 Ibid., p 140.

8 Ibid. p 142.

nf. Ss

2

AUGUSTE COMTE AND THE ORIGIN OF
POSITIVIST SOCIOLOGY

Yelena Osipova

1. Comte and His Time

Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism in philosophy and so-
ciology, was born in Montpellier in 1798 in the family of a civil
servant. The first half of the nineteenth century was an ex-
tremely important period in the history of France. The rapid
development of capitalism and the moulding of a new class
structure of society were accompanied with frequent changes of
the forms of political power. The Directory, the Consulate, the
Empire, the Restoration, the Revolution of 1830, the July
Monarchy, the Revolution of 1848, the Second Republic, and
the Second Empire were the main political milestones of the
period. Parallel with growth of the bourgeoisie’s wealth and
power, the poverty and strength of resistance of the working
class also grew. The development of science and engineering was
combined with a crisis of the traditional ideological systems and
intense philosophical quests.

All that had its effect on Comte’s outlook. Early abandoning
the Catholicism and monarchism of his father’s family, he de-
veloped an agnostic stance on traditional religion. His education
in science, received in the Ecole polytechnique in Paris, and
republican sympathies opposed both to Napoleon and the
Bourbons, conditioned the character of his theoretical views.
Expelled from the Ecole as a free-thinker, he became a tutor
in mathematics. His first small works were devoted to mathemat-

22

ical matters. While studying the works of important French
mathematicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries like Louis Lagrange and Gaspard Monge, he became
familiar with the problematic of the philosophy of science.
Montesquieu and Condorcet, out of the broad range of authors
whose works the young Comte read, had a special influence on
him; the former by his affirmation of the dependence of polit-
ical and legal phenomena on natural laws, and the latter by his
formulation of the law of mankind’s progressive development
and his conception of history in which the evolution of social
ideas, institutions, and relations had a main place. While having
a lively interest in political economy, Comte was critical of the
doctrines of bourgeois liberal economists who preached freedom
of competition, which should, in their view, bring about social
harmony of free and independent individuals. He opposed to
these doctrines the idea of social unity and the political integra-
tion of individuals and classes, basing himself on the concep-
tions of the traditionalists and their treatment of social order.

In 1817-1824 Comte worked as Saint-Simon’s secretary,
and was undoubtedly receptive of many of his ideas. But the
disagreements between them on root theoretical and political
matters led to a breach. Saint-Simon’s ideas about class struggle
of exploiters and producers, and his high appreciation of the
role of labour remained incomprehensible and unacceptable to
Comte. Whereas Saint-Simon spoke of a society of free and
equal producers, Comte propagandised a centralised state with
a hierarchical structure. While Saint-Simon put the idea of social
progress in the foreground, Comte stressed the importance of
social statics. His system of positive philosophy, although it
contained elements resembling Saint-Simon’s conception, was
based on quite other ideological and theoretical foundations.
His six-volume Cours de philosophie positive,’ published
between 1839 and 1842, developed the principles of the classifi-
cation of sciences, positive philosophy, and sociology. His
second work was devoted to the foundations of the politics
and religion of the future. This was Le systéme de politique
Positive ou Traité de sociologie? published in four volumes
(1851-1854). During his lifetime he also published his Traité
d'astronomie populaire (1845), Discours sur l'ensemble de
Positivisme (1848), Catéchisme positiviste (1852), Appel aux

23

Rao oe

Conservateurs (1855), and Synthése subjective (1856).

Giving lectures for workers at the Polytechnical Society,
Comte made personal contacts with them, and in 1848 organ-
ised the Positivist Society on the basis of this group of the
audience, and students drawn to him; the aims of the society
were education of the people in the spirit of the positivist
outlook on the world. At the same time he and his supporters
sharply opposed the revolutionary actions of the Parisian pro-
letariat. Not getting support, in the conditions of the revolution-
ary situation, from either of the belligerent parties, Comte
found himself completely isolated. His appeal to the intellectual
elite to found a party of order and progress was also not crowned
with success. He died in 1857, lonely, neglected, and thought
to be a madman.

Despite the seeming contradiction between the first and
second periods of his work, they were based on one and the
same ideas and premisses. Ideas of the moral unity of mankind,
and of the reorganisation of society on the basis of a new
‘religion’, positivism, which was at the same time a theory of
social science, ran through all his works. He considered the
functions of the social science he strove to create, and of the
new ‘religion’, to be identical, suggesting that there could be a
‘true’, ‘scientific’ religion or, which was the same thing, a
moral science that performed the religious functions of social
integration. Hence one of the paradoxes characteristic of his
views.

2. The Classification of the Sciences

The separation of the sciences from metaphysics and theology
was the main idea of Comte’s positive method.? In his opinion
true science was characterised by renouncing ‘unanswerable’
questions, i.e., ones that could not be confirmed or refuted,
relying on facts established by observation. He considered
questions of the essence and causes of things to be such
‘metaphysical’, unscientific matters. It was the task of science,
according to him, to discover laws, understood as constant,
repeated connections between phenomena. This limitation was
due to a striving to gain precise, definite knowledge that could

24

provide a basis for predicting the future.*

Comte came forward as the abolisher of philosophy in the
old, traditional sense of the word. In his notions it had no
special subject-matter of its own, nor a method different from
those of science. The positive philosophy was a systematisation
of sciences or the ‘scientific in the sciences’. In order to expound
the positive philosophy it was necessary to expound an all-
embracing system of sciences that included analysis of their
subject-matter, methods, laws, similarities and differences.

When developing his classification of sciences, Comte based
himself on their objective attributes. First of all, he divided
them into the abstract and the concrete. The former studied the
laws of certain categories of phenomena, the latter applied these
laws to partial fields. Biology, for example, was the general
abstract science of life, and medicine a concrete science ap-
plying the general laws of biology. Comte distinguished five
abstract, theoretical sciences: astronomy, physics, chemistry,
biology, and sociology, and supplemented the main categories
of natural phenomena (astronomical, physical, chemical, and
biological) with the category of social phenomena, thus giving
his classification the ‘character of universality indispensable to
its definitive constitution’.® His ‘encyclopaedic ladder’ was
built on the principle of the growing complexity of the phenom-
ena studied by the respective sciences. Social phenomena were
distinguished by the greatest complexity and at the same time
depended on all the others, which explained the later rise of
sociology. Nevertheless these were natural phenomena governed
by natural laws specific for the field. Comte first called the po-
sitive science of society social physics, but later sociology,
explaining the need to introduce the new term not by a passion
for neologisms but by the need to create a special discipline
devoted to positive investigation of the fundamental laws proper
to social phenomena. He stressed that sociology must be a
theoretical discipline in contrast to the Adolphe Quételet’s
descriptive ‘social physics’. The conversion of sociology into a
Positive science completed the system of positive philosophy,
thus marking the onset of the positive stage of development of
the human mind and human society. It meant, in Comte’s view,
a real ‘positive revolution’, the victory of science over the
scholasticism of past epochs.

25

=

Comte’s views on science corresponded to the metaphysical
(antidialectical) method of thinking predominant in natural
science in the first third of the nineteenth century. Natural
science had not yet then provided convincing facts in favour
of the idea of the development of nature, and put forward only
separate brilliant guesses, that could not yet be converted into
scientific theories. The metaphysical mode of thinking decided
Comte’s classifying the sciences as existing side by side, and not
as arising from each other. He discovered only structural links
between them, and not genetic ones; his classification was
based on the principle of co-ordination, not of subordination.°

In spite of the general metaphysical character of his outlook
on the world, there were certain elements of dialectical thinking
in it all the same. While he denied the possibility of knowing
separate facts isolated from one another, he insisted on their
relations being investigated, and called for examination of their
functioning in the context of the greater entities they formed
part of. Thus, it was necessary, when investigating the activity
of separate organs, to bear in mind the structure and properties
of the organism as a whole, and to relate every phenomenon of
social life with such wholes as the epoch, civilisation, and
humanity.

The integral approach was Comte’s main methodological
postulate from which he criticised contemporaneous psychology
and political economy. He considered the integral or whole
(organism, society) more accessible to direct investigation than
the phenomena functioning within it. And whereas the knowl-
edge in sciences that studied inanimate nature was always rela-
tive, and could not be full, it could be much more complete in
the biological and social sciences, since there were certain con-
crete wholes in them, amenable to study. Such an entity as
humanity concerned man most of all; knowledge of it was most
accessible to him, that is why it had attained the highest logical
fulness and had become absolute.

Comte’s positive method played a certain role in the struggle
against spiritualism. His stressing of the great value of science,
and demand for its autonomy, and his opposing it to official
religion and metaphysical speculations had progressive signific-
ance as a protest against open idealism and clericalism. Many
naturalists interpreted positivism in the spirit of natural-science

materialism. As an ‘anti-philosophical’ trend in philosophy that
strove to rise ‘above’ the basic philosophical question and the
struggle of the two principal trends in philosophy, positivism,
by its appearance, marked a crisis of bourgeois spiritual culture
and presaged its further deepening. But in Brazil, China, Japan,
Poland, Russia, and Turkey, and other countries, the ideas of
Comte, Spencer, Taine, and their disciples and interpreters were
antidotes to religious mysticism, speculation, and loose methods
of argument. Positivist evolutionism was sometimes misin-
terpreted in the spirit of materialism (I. M. Sechenov) or found
an analogue in the form of certain scientific constructs (Thomas
Huxley, Le Dantec, and others).

Comte’s methodology united diverse trends. While it played
a certain progressive role in its day, it later became more and
more a brake on the development of science, since it was based
on an untrue, historically limited interpretation of it. As the
French historian of science, André Cresson put it: ‘Science
seems everywhere to show that Comte clipped its wings too
much. It can do more than he thought and said’.’

3. The Subject-matter and Tasks of Sociology

Comte counterposed sociology as a positive science to theolog-
ical and metaphysical speculations about society and man. On
the one hand, he criticised theologians, who, by regarding man
as a being different in principle from animals, considered him
created by God or Providence. On the other hand, while criticis-
ing the philosophers who preceded him as ‘metaphysicians’ who
created ‘social utopias’, he reproached them for understanding
society as the creation of human reason and the rational will of
individuals. Sociology, according to him, was the sole science
that studied how man’s reason and mind were improved by the
influence of social life. This idea developed into a whole concep-
tion of the individual as an abstraction and of society as reality
governed by natural laws. Social phenomena, unlike biological
Ones, were in a constant state of change and transformation, and
developed in time. Their essence was historicity. Comte‘there-
fore had exceptional respect for Condorcet who had looked
On society from a historical point of view.

re ee

While focussing attention on the natural, law-governed
character of social phenomena, Comte opposed voluntarism and
exaggeration of the role of ‘great men’, and pointed out the
correspondence of a political regime to the level of development
of civilisation. While not denying the role of the economic
factor, he all the same considered civilisation primarily a spiri-
tual, psychological community, a community of ideas. Ideas, he
wrote, governed and overturned the world, and the whole
mechanism rested ultimately on opinions.® The main content of
social development and evolution was scientific thought, and
the ‘scientific spirit’? His picture of the development of the
history of society was built on that. -

Comte’s argument about sociology as a science, and about
its subject-matter and range of problems, had a very abstract
character. He outlined the field of sociological investigations
very broadly and indefinitely; it included all investigations
that did not come within the purview of the other sciences
named in his classification. The principal, primary reality from
which the investigator started was society taken in its integrity
and wholeness. Comte understood by that the organic unity
of all mankind or of any of its major parts, connected by
a consensus omnium, characterised by a harmonious func-
tioning of its structural elements. The extraordinary com-
plexity of society was due to the contemporary factors operat-
ing in it being merged with historical ones, and to past genera-
tions influencing contemporary ones. Society, or as he began to
call it, humanity, was the supreme reality (sui generis) and the
supreme being.

One can see rudiments in Comte’s views of what subse-
quently began to be called the systems approach to social life.
But Comte did not understand the real dialectic of social ele-
ments and structures and treated the elements of social life as
simple, eternal, and immutable, and social development as the
result of various combinations of one and the same elements.
His seminal ideas about the objectified products of human activ-
ity that could become the subject of the sociologist’s study were
drowned in a flood of general arguments about humanity as the
supreme being. Comtean sociology was an idealist philosophy
of history that included many metaphysical, speculative ele-
ments.

28

4. The Methods of Sociology

An essential part of Comtean sociology was the development of
methods applicable to the study of society. While opposing
speculation on the one hand, and the extremes of empiricism on
the other, Comte substantiated the applicability in sociology of
observation, and of experimental, comparative, and historical
methods.

Observation, he said, was the main method of investigation
in sociology. But he could not define what demands social ob-
servation should meet, so as to be considered reliable and exact.
The observation of social facts should put sociology on the level
of science, and give the material the sociologist worked with
the character of objectivity. Empirical material should be
amassed under the control of theory, otherwise the sociologist
would achieve nothing except a conglomeration of a mass of
isolated, haphazard facts that said nothing in themselves. ‘It
was obvious,’ he wrote, ‘that any social observations, either
static or dynamic, should require the continual use of funda-
mental theories.”!°

Absence of a positive theory relying on what one could
gather and generalise the facts, was the main difficulty of
sociology in Comte’s opinion; it was consequently caught in a
vicious circle since it needed a theory in order to make observa-
tions, and observations in order to create a theory.

Among the less important difficulties connected with ob-
servation Comte noted the complexity of getting the scientific
training needed to free the investigator from obstacles of an
unscientific character—prejudices, common opinions, etc.
Here, too, a scientific theory that prevented speculation and
provided the investigator with the needed concepts was a
help.

Comte noted the great importance not only of direct ob-
servations but also of indirect evidence. Study of historical and
cultural memorials, customs, and rituals, for example, and
analysis and comparison of languages could give sociology con-
tinually useful means of positive exploration .'?

Comte considered experiment the second method in impor-
tance of sociology. Direct experiment in sociology consisted in
observing the changes of a phenomenon under the impact of

29

ht ae

research conditions specially created for the purpose. Indirect
or mediated experiment he understood as investigation of
pathological deviations of society, deviations that arose through
social upheavals, mainly of a revolutionary character. Social
perturbations that shook the social organism were similar, in
his opinion, to the illnesses of the individual organism. They
clearly revealed the social organism’s fundamental laws, since
the illness made it possible to discern the normal better.

A third method of the positive sciences also applicable in
sociology was the comparative one by which the life of peoples
living in the same time in various parts of the world were
compared so as to establish general laws of the existence and
development of societies.

In Comte’s view comparisons of animal societies with human
ones, so as to show their similarities and differences, could also
be useful. Finally, one could compare the social position of the
various classes of one and the same society, but a conclusion
about how far they were influenced by the main phases of de-
velopment of civilisation was obscured by the influence of the
general spirit of the times, which smoothed out differences.

The weakness of the comparative method, in Comte’s view,
was that it did not show the sequence of social states, but repre-
sented them as co-existing. That could create an incorrect
notion of the stages of evolution. The comparative method
could therefore only be successfully employed if it were gov-
erned by a definite theory of the development of humanity.

The specific method of sociology most corresponding to
the nature of social phenomena, Comte considered to be the
historical, i.e., the method of historical comparisons of various
consecutive states of humanity.!* Only by comparing a whole
series of social phenomena taken in their sequence, could the
scientist note the growth of some physical, intellectual, moral,
or political feature or tendency, and the corresponding weaken-
ing of the opposite tendency, and on that basis scientifically
predict the final result, provided that it fully conformed to the
system of the general laws of human development.! ;

Such a peculiarity of sociology as the necessity to proceed
habitually from the general effect to the parts was best ex-
pressed in the historical method.1* According to Comte there
was no difference between history and sociology, which he

30

sometimes called the political science.'15 Comte considered the
predominance of the historical point of view a sign of the times
and at once the essential principle and general result of positiv-
ism.'°

Discussion of the methods of sociology belongs to the most
rational part of Comte’s system. He started from a thesis about
the existence of natural laws of social life, discovery of which
would make it possible to create a science of society. He did
not, moreover, deny the uniqueness of society compared with
nature, and looked for specific methods of investigating it. The
fruitfulness of the idea of the natural-history character of
social patterns was particularly obvious when one remembers
that theological and spiritualist conceptions that denied the
possibility of scientific knowledge of society were predominant
at that time. The posing of the question of the need to rely
on a firm theoretical foundation for carrying out sociological
research was also important. It was Comte’s misfortune that he
could not propose anything as this foundation except his
theories of social statics and dynamics, the laws of which had
a speculative, abstract character that in no way corresponded to
his own initial precepts.

5. Social Statics

Comte divided sociology into two major sections, social statics
and social dynamics. The first studied the conditions of exis-
tence and laws of the functioning of a social system, the latter
the laws of the development and change of social systems.
Social statics was a theory of social order, organisation, and
harmony. Comte regarded society as an organic whole all of
whose parts were interconnected and could be understood only
in unity. That conception was aimed directly against individu-
alistic theories and attempts to regard society as the product of
a contract between individuals. Exploration of the principles
that determined the structure of society, and guaranteed har-
mony and order, was inseverably connected, for Comte, with
the social policy, which could realise them. He treated the main
social institutions (the family, state, and religion) from the
standpoint primarily of their social functions and their role in

31

social integration. His reasoning was thus coloured by conserva-
tive tones, and he painted the future in the form of a romantic-
ally idealised past.

Comte defined family relations as a moral and emotional
union based on attraction and mutual sympathy. The role of
the family was to mediate between the individual and the kin,
to bring up the young generation in a spirit of altruism, and to
teach it to overcome innate selfishness. The family figured
with him as either a spontaneous source of our moral education
or as the natural basis of our political organisation. In its first
aspect each family of the present time prepared the society of
the future; in its second aspect a new family extended present
society.17 _

When examining the main family relations, i.e., those be-
tween the sexes and between the generations, he did not deny
the historical variability of the family. But he argued essentially
about the contemporaneous bourgeois family, idealising it,
and not linking analysis of it with problems of property, inheri-
tance, money, etc. He expressed himself sharply, in a patriarchal
spirit, against women’s equality, and everywhere stressed the
need to consolidate the authority and power of the male—father
and husband. Women, in his view, were beneath men intellectu-
ally, and were inferior to them in will power. Woman’s social
role was determined by her emotional and moral qualities, her
capacity to unite people and to educate them morally. It was
the task of women to exert an elevating influence on coarse
male natures, and to awaken social feelings in them, based on
solidarity. So the positive theory of the human family came
down to systematising the spontaneous influence of feminine
sentiment on masculine activity .'®

Women’s role in the upbringing of the rising generation
was just as great. The family was the guardian and transmitter
of traditions and of the experience of past generations. In the
family the individual was socialised and acquired qualities
needed for successful service to mankind, got rid of natural
individualism, and learned to live for others. Good relations
between the generations maintained equilibrium and the balance
between traditions and innovation, whose bearers were the old
and the young.

Co-operation, based on division of labour, was an analogue

of family relations on the broader social plane. In it each did
that to which he was most inclined; all were interested in one
another. So the consensus universalis arose and the spontaneous
interaction of individuals.

By stressing the significance of emotional and moral ties,
and putting the accent on the element of consensus, Comte
pushed economic relations and connections into the back-
ground, although he did not deny their importance. He con-
sidered the principle of laissez-faire absurd, as promoting display
of the worst, selfish sides of human nature. Social harmony
could not be established where competition and exploitation
prevailed .'?

Comte also saw the negative aspects of the division of labour.
It promoted development of the capacities of each and sup-
pressed general aptitudes; specialisation narrowed a person’s
outlook; social feelings united only persons of the same voca-
tions, creating hostility to other professions and trades, etc.?°
Excessive division of labour could lead to the breaking down
of society into separate corporations, disrupting its unity,
generating competition, and arousing the basest instincts.

From his stating that there was a tendency toward the
dissolution of society and disruption of its organic unity, Comte
deduced the need for the political power of government as ex-
presser of the ‘general spirit’. The social purpose of government,
according to him, was to prevent as far as possible this fatal
tendency to a fundamental scattering of ideas, feelings, and
interests, an inevitable result of the principle of human develop-
ment, and which, if it were able to pursue its natural course,
would inevitably end by stopping social progress in all im-
portant respects.?! The state was thus an agent of social solidar-
ity, and submission to it was the sacred duty of the individual.
The guardian of social order, the state, performed economic,
political, and moral functions, the last of which Comte consid-
ered to be the chief one. When demonstrating the necessity of a
division of moral and political power to prevent intellectual
and moral terror, which could hold back the development of
thought and subordinate it to the narrow practical interests of
tulers, Comte gave a high appreciation of the Middle Ages
for the division of authority that existed then between state
and Church. When lauding in every way the value and merit

33
3-1147

of the spiritual dictatorship exercised by the mediaeval Church,
he saw an analogue of it in positivism as a set of ideas, prin-
ciples, and conceptions supplemented by a kind of cult—a
series of civil rites and rituals meant to replace the old, tradi-
tional Church rituals.

The working out of the problems of spiritual life, the slogan
of ‘live for others’, and his ethic of responsibilities did not
attract many supporters. Comte could not correctly pose,
let alone decide, the most important social problems. He idealis-
tically underestimated the role of economic relations and
exaggerated the role of spiritual ones. He regarded the division
of labour not so much as an economic institution, as a kind of
moral and psychological relation, without correlating it with a
certain level of development of the productive forces, and
furthermore with the character of the relations of production.
He treated the formation of social groups, above all of voca-
tional ones, abstractly, without deducing them from property
relations. From that logically stemmed his justification and
recognition of the need of the existing social structure.

6. Social Dynamics

Comte said that study of the dynamics of humanity’s collective
life necessarily constituted the positive theory of social pro-
gress.2* By consciously abstracting himself from the diversity
of the concrete forms of historical development, he created a
scheme based on examples taken from the history of the ‘most
civilised’ European nations. According to him progress meant
development along an ascending line, although, in trying to free
the concept of progress from ties with ‘metaphysical values’,
he stressed that it included simple development without any
sense of perfecting or improvement. Science, he wrote, could
not answer whether social progress was also moral progress,
although he himself was convinced that it was.

When sorting out the role of ihe various factors that influ-
ence social development, Comte divided them into primary and
secondary. The primary, decisive factor was spiritual, mental
development. He classed climate, race, life expectancy, growth
of population, which conditioned the division of labour and

34

stimulated development of man’s intellectual and moral features,
as secondary. The secondary factors could only accelerate or
slow down society’s progress, which occurred in a regular way
and could not be altered.

By subdividing progress into the material (improvement of
external living conditions), the physical (the perfecting of
human nature), the intellectual (the development of intellect,
the transition from a religious and metaphysical outlook on
the world to a positive one), and the moral (development of
collectivism and of moral feelings), Comte attached special
significance to the last two. The social organism, he wrote,
was based on an aggregate of views, ‘opinions’, which while
gradually changed affected all other aspects of social life.
That being the case, social dynamics should be based on the
history of the human spirit.

The most general abstract concepts were the most important
indicators for him of the development of reason; the degree of
development of society could therefore be judged by the corres-
ponding philosophical systems. For each stage in the develop-
ment of human reason, which proceeded regularly through three
main stages (theological, metaphysical, and positive), there
corresponded definite forms of art, economy, politics, and
social organisation.

The law of three stages, the cornerstone of Comte’s social
dynamics was at once a historical and a logical law; the three
stages of the development of the human mind corresponded to
three similar stages of the development of history.

Comte divided the theological or fictitious stage, which
embraced antiquity and the early Middle Ages (to 1300), into
three periods: fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. During
fetishism people ascribed life to external objects and saw gods
in them. During polytheism, which was most widespread in
Greece and Rome, ‘fictitious beings’, by whose intervention all
phenomena were explained, were endowed with life. A ‘poetical
world outlook’ was created that encouraged development of
artistic creation but was incapable of guiding practice. And he
saw in that the reason for the weak development of material
culture in antiquity.

The epoch of monotheism was the age of Christianity. The
religion of one god altered the image of the world, political

35
3°

and social relations, customs, and morality. Comte described
at length the allegedly unusual harmony between the mediaeval
state and religion, and considered Catholicism the author of
that ‘precious creation of humanity’s political genius’.?* The
model of certain social institutions should be sought precisely
in the Middle Ages.

The metaphysical stage, embracing 1300 to 1800, seemed to
Comte to be a transitional period in which disruption of the
old beliefs, the foundation of social order, was characteristic.
The Reformation, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, revolu-
tions (‘the political triumph of the metaphysicians and legists’?*)
were the most important events of that time. ‘Negative’ critical
philosophy led to the decline of all authority, of the power of
the ruling classes, and of religion. But revolution (in Comte’s
opinion), while emancipating the individual and oppressed’clas-
ses, did not create a doctrine that could unite minds. The con-
ceptions of the French revolutionaries, he considered, were
based on ignorance of history and its laws. Striving for revolu-
tionary changes meant going against the laws of history, disrup-
ting its regular course, plunging society into a morbid state,
and so on. The ‘metaphysical spirit’ born in that period, sanc-
tioned philosophical doubts, moral turpitude, and political
disorder. Contemporaneous society, sunk into anarchy, was
experiencing a need for a new ideology to replace the false,
fictitious doctrines and perform an integrating social role.

Evidence that society was gradually entering the final,
positive era was the spread of the sciences, growth of their
social significance, and creation of the theory of positivism.
The industrial system was replacing the military one charac-
teristic of the theological epoch. The use of scientific discoveries
for the good of all humanity guaranteed harmonious, equal
development of all the elements of life. Characteristic features
of the positive epoch were the victory of altruism over selfish-
ness, growth of social feelings, and rapid development of ma-
terial culture, which ensured an easier, more pleasant life for
all, justice, and peace.

Compared with certain contemporary and preceding histor-
ical and philosophical-sociological works, Comte’s social dy-
namics was not without certain merits. He tried to bring out the
pattern of social evolution, which voluntarist historians had not

noticed. He opposed a historical approach to theories of natural
law and social contract, and the point of view of society as a
whole to liberal individualism. His historico-evolutionary ap-
proach to religion was also fruitful; he linked the development
of religion with a broad range of socio-political relations,
although he deduced the unity of society and the link between
certain forms of religion and socio-political organisation from
a community of ideas rather than from economic structure.

But, having based his social dynamics on the law of three
stages, Comte refrained from analysing the diversity of the
concrete forms of nations’ historical development, adducing as
illustrations only facts that supported the scheme he had
constructed. His theory of social development was no more than
a metaphysical, speculative scheme. He could not define either
the true specifics of social life or the driving forces of history,
let alone the direction of society’s future development.?*

7. The Positive Polity

The fundamental weakness of Comte’s theory became parti-
cularly obvious when he passed from the general theses of social
dynamics to substantiation of his positive programme, ‘social
polity’. He attached great significance to that part of his work.
In contrast to the objective method aimed at discovering truth,
the core of the positive polity should be subjective values and
human interests and ideals. Accordingly he preached a subjec-
tive method in politics. One of his works, he said (having in
mind The Positive Philosophy) had drawn a philosophy from
science, while the other (The System of Positive Polity) had
converted into a complete, definitive religion? °

In this new religion the place of God was taken by society,
which the individual should recognise as the Supreme Being to
which he owed everything.

As the ‘religion of humanity’ positivism preached the com-
plete submergence of the individual in society, universal love,
and brotherhood. Comte deduced the great social role of scien-
tists and artists from the idea of the unity of emotions and
reason; they would be the new priests, the guardians of positiv-
ist dogmas, and the custodians of the new cult. The idea of a

positivist church was also not alien to him; its aim was to be
an association initially of co-religionists, and later of the people
of the whole world. The positivist federation of nations with
headquarters in Paris was to have the purpose of ensuring last-
ing peace on Earth.

Comte attached great importance to the proletariat in his
discussion of this vague programme. ‘Our proletarians,’ he
wrote, ‘alone are capable of becoming the auxiliaries of the new
philosophers.’?7 But to be that they had to break completely
with socialist doctrines that infringed the institution of property
(which positivists considered sacred). He sharply opposed the
idea of communism and the thesis that the regulation of himan
activity depended on the mode of ownership.?® In the positivist
society property was to be treated as the accumulation of social
wealth, and people who knew how to create and multiply pro-
perty as servants of humanity. Comte put forward a vague idea
of an industrial patriciate made up of industrialists and techni-
cians, from whom three dictators (the triumvirate) were to be
chosen to direct the affairs of industry, agriculture, and finance,
concentrating legislative and executive power wholly in their
hands. Moral authority was to be separated from political
and economic administration, and to be in the hands of
people specially appointed to exercise it, viz., philosophers
and artists.

Comte’s ‘systematic socialism’, which he counterposed to
the ‘spontaneous socialism’ of the workers, was in fact a very
vague, petty-bourgeois utopia.

Prolix arguments about universal love, order, and progress
covered the reactionary political sense of the idea of the cor-
porate system in which spiritual authority was concentrated
in a caste of philosophers, material possibilities and power in
capitalists, while work that gave the proletarian moral satisfac-
tion and social recognition remained his lot. The social reforms
and transformations proclaimed by Comte were not aimed at
liquidating the antagonistic social relations engendered by
private property, but rather at changing relations between
people, and an intellectual-moral reform of consciousness.
Comte’s teaching was the antithesis of Marxism, which was
more and more widely penetrating France, and a typical doc-
trine of the ‘centre’.

38

|

8. Comte’s Place in the History of Sociology

During Comte’s lifetime his philosophical and socio-political
ideas were comparatively uninfluential. But interest in positiv-
ism as a philosophical doctrine grew from the 1860s. Its appeal
to rigorous positive knowledge in contrast to speculative meta-
physical constructs, which corresponded to the needs of the de-
velopment of science, was especially important. Many leading
naturalists proclaimed themselves positivists. There arose a
positivist historiography (Buckle and Taine), a positivist theory
of culture (Ernest Renan), a positivist criminology (Cesare
Lombroso), a positivist logic and psychology, and theory of
literature and art, and even a positivist ‘metaphysics’ (Vacherot
and Fouillée).

Comte’s role in the history of sociology is very contradic-
tory. Having almost completely synthesised many of the main
ideas of the social science of his time, he aimed them against
the speculative-abstract approach to social life and theological
conceptions. The appeal to positive knowledge, recognition
of the law-governed nature of history, attention to study of
social institutions and of the structure of society—all had a
strong influence in his time on the development of social sci-
ence. Historians of sociology remark on his creative mind,??
and his encyclopaedic knowledge; some authors have even
drawn a parallel between him and Hegel.2° According to a
modem French commentator, reading Comte leaves an impres-
sion of reading a contemporary and his work is still topical.

Many of the ideas and concepts put forward by Comte
have in fact firmly become currency of bourgeois sociological
thought. They include the idea of society as an organic whole,
developed in organistic theories, and in the sociological concep-
tion of Comte’s major follower in France, Emile Durkheim, and
later in Parsons’ structural functionalism.?! The delimitation of
the laws of the-development and functioning of society, and the
search for factors determining historical development, social
integration, and the stability of social systems were seminal.
This theme became a leading one in the French sociological
school. Comte’s idea of the objective nature of sociology as a
science developing along the principles of natural science, had
a great influence on social science.

39

But many of the ideas associated with his name had in fact
been put forward by his predecessors, in particular by Saint-
Simon. In addition there were two root faults in his sociological
conception, as in all positivist sociology, viz., idealism, which
was expressed in his law of three stages and his attempts to
explain historical changes primarily by the influence of ideas;
and its metaphysical and antidialectical character.?? The latter
was expressed, in particular, in the speculative nature of his
theory of progress.

Comte’s sociology is full of contradictions. While calling
for reforms based on positive knowledge of society, he, in fact,
at the same time, rejected the possibility of intervention in the
course of history. His programme of socio-political reorganisa-
tion of society was inspired by a conservative social ideal. As
Coser aptly puts it, he ‘was torn between the twin demands of
order and progress’.>°

In trying to make social science ‘positive’, Comte dares
assert, in spite of the extreme difficulty of his grand subject,
that, properly treated, it permitted conclusions just as certain
as those of geometry itself.?* He included elements of religious
thinking in social science as well, calling for the postulates
and dogmas of sociology to be applied without reflection and
analysis, and for them to be believed without doubt. That
teduced the principles of science to the level of everyday
consciousness. Comte himself often asserted that positive philos-
ophy was only a modification of ordinary common sense.
Science was thus deprived of one of its most essential qualities,
namely, antidogmatism.

Notes

' The Cours was translated and condensed into two volumes with
Comte’s approval by Harriet Martineau, and published by J. Chapman in
London in 1853 (3rd edition, 1893) under the title The Positive Philos-
ophy of Auguste Comte (hereinafter referred to as The Positive Philos-
ophy). Another edition in three volumes was published by George Bell
& Co. in London in 1896.

? The Systéme was translated by J. H. Bridges and published by Long-
mans, Green in London in four volumes in 1875-77, under the title
System of Positive Polity.

3 Comte explained that the word ‘positive’ (positiv) had several
meanings: (1) the real or opposed to the chimerical; (2) the useful as
opposed to the useless; (3) certainty in contrast to indecision; (4) the
exact as opposed to the vague; and (5) the positive as the contrary of
the negative (‘In this case, it indicates one of the most prominent proper-
ties of the true modern philosophy, by showing it destined, by its nature,
not to destroy but to organise’ (Discours sur esprit positif. Ordre et
progrés. Paris, 1905, pp 64-66).

The term ‘positive’, in the sense of ‘organic, definite, exact’, had been
jntroduced by Saint-Simon, and is met in his works.

* For more details of Comte’s conception of a science, see: B. M. Ked-
rov. Klassifikatsiya nauk (Classification of the Sciences), Book 1 (Nauka,
Moscow, 1961).

5 Auguste Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, 31d ed., Vol. 1
(Bailliére et Fils, Paris, 1869), p 21.

° B. M. Kedrov, Op.cit., p 141.

7 André Cresson. Les courants de la pensée philosophique francaise,
Vol. II (Colin, Paris, 1927), p 172.

® See: Auguste Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, Vol. 1 (Bail-
liére et Fils, Paris, 1869), pp 40-41.

° See: August Comte, Op.cit., Vol. 4, p 268.

° Tbid., p 301.

't Ibid., p 306.

2 Ibid., p 322.

'3 [bid., p 328.

4 Ibid., p 260.

'S [bid., pp 206-207.

16 See: Auguste Comte. Systéme de politique positive, ou Traité
de sociologie, Vol. 3 (Chez Carilian-Goery and V. Dalmont, Paris, 1853),
pl.

7 Ibid., Vol. 2, p 183.

‘8 Ibid., p 204.

*® Auguste Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, Vol. 1, pp 426-429.

2° Ibid., p 429.

*1 Ibid., Vol. 4, p 430.

23 Ibid., p 232.

23 Auguste Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, Vol. 5, p 230.

24 Ibid., Vol. 6, p 287.

75 See: Otwin Massing. Fortschritt und Gegenrevolution. Die Gesell-
Sschaftslehre Comtes in ihrer sozialen Funktion (Klett, Stuttgart, 1966).

26 August Comte. Systéme de politique positive, Vol. 1, p 448.

27 Ibid., p 129.

28 Ibid., p 152.

29 Lewis A. Coser. Masters of Sociological Thought, 2nd Ed. (Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1977), p 40.

3° See: F.S. Marvin. Comte. The Founder of Sociology (Russell
& Russell, New York, 1965).

3. Paul Kellermann. Organizistische Vorstellungen in soziologischen
Konzeptionen bei Comte, Spencer, und Parsons (Dissertation, Munich,
1966).

32 1.S. Kon. Der Positivismus in der Soziologie (Akademie-Verlag,
Berlin, 1968), p 19.

33 Lewis A. Coser. Op. cit., p 41.

34 Auguste Comte. Discours sur l'esprit positif, p 111.

cia

3

HERBERT SPENCER’S SOCIOLOGICAL
CONCEPTION

Igor Kon

1. Spencer and His Time

The birth of sociology in England is linked with the name of
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). In the middle of the nineteenth
century, when his scientific activity was beginning, British
capitalism was at the zenith of its prosperity. England, having
completed the industrial revolution before all other countries,
had far outstripped them in level of economic development.
In the eyes of mid-century world opinion, she was the symbol
of prosperity and liberalism. In spite of acute class contradic-
tions, the British middle classes were complacently proud
of the progress made, and looked to the future with con-
fidence. That mood had its effect, as well, on Spencer’s social
philosophy.

Spencer worked from 1837 to 1841 as an engineer and
technician on a railway, simultaneously studying mathematics
and natural sciences. Then, for several years, he contributed to
the press. In 1853, having inherited a tidy legacy from an uncle,
he resigned his post and began the modest life of an independ-
ent scientist and publicist. Even after he had attained fame,
he refused all official honours.

In the early 1860s Spencer made a tremendous effort to
create a system of synthetic philosophy that would unite all
the theoretical sciences of the time. This work included ten
volumes, consisting of five separate titles: First Principles

43

(1862), Principles of Biology (two volumes, 1864, 1867),
Principles of Psychology (1870-1872, three volumes, the first
edition of which appeared in 1855); Principles of Sociology
(three volumes, 1876, 1882, 1896), which was anticipated in
1873 in an independent book The Study of Sociology, and
Principles of Ethics (two volumes, 1892, 1893).

What were the sources of his ideas?

In his youth he was not interested in philosophy; later he
did not read philosophical and psychological books, preferring
to derive the necessary information from conversations with
friends and popular editions. According to his secretary, there
was not a single book by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, or Kant in his
library. His knowledge of history, too, was very weak.

Spencer borrowed much more from the natural sciences,
especially from those parts in which the idea of development
was being born or worked out. When Darwin’s Origin of Species
appeared in 1858, Spencer warmly welcomed it. Darwin in turn
highly valued Spencer’s theory of evolution, acknowledged its
influence, and even placed Spencer intellectually above himself.
Yet, in spite of this respect and influence, Spencer’s evolution-
ism was more Lamarckian than Darwinian.

A second line of influence, perceived and acknowledged by
Spencer himself, was the works of English economists of the
eighteenth century, especially those of Malthus and Adam
Smith. As we know, not only Spencer, but also Darwin deduced
their idea of survival of the fittest precisely from Malthus,
although they both gave this theory an optimistic, ‘progressive’
ring, it did not have with Malthus.

Finally, the ideas of the English Utilitarians, in particular
of Bentham, whose individualism Spencer intensified even more,
had quite a clear influence on him. As an apostle of extreme
bourgeois liberalism, he consistently followed the principle of
laissez-faire all his life. He had already, in his first book Social
Statics (1851), formulated a ‘law of equal freedom’,! according
to which ‘every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his
faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty by every
other man’.? Freedom of individual actions, competition and
survival of the fittest were all that were needed for the develop-
ment of society. Consistently working up that idea, Spencer
opposed not only laws to aid the poor but also any state inter-

ference in public affairs. His ideological position was militantly
antisocialist. He considered the principle of collectivism disas-
trous from the biological standpoint and psychologically absurd,
seeing in it encouragement of the worst at the cost of the best.

Spencer’s attitude to Comte presents special interest. His
own ideas had already been formed in the main when he became
acquainted with Comte’s works. On the whole he highly appre-
ciated Comte, ascribing to him ‘the credit of having set forth
with comparative definiteness, the connexion between the
Science of Life and the Science of Society’.? Comte’s ‘way of
conceiving social phenomena’, he wrote, ‘was much superior
to all previous ways; and among other of its superiorities, was
this recognition of the dependence of Sociology on Biology’ .*

Later, however, there began to be serious disagreements.
Spencer was, first of all, much more naturalistic than Comte.
The latter’s messianism, the ‘law of three stages’, and other of
his attempts to arrive at social development from spiritual
development were profoundly alien to Spencer.

What is Comte’s professed aim? To give a coherent account of the
progress of human conceptions. What is my aim? To give a coherent
account of the progress of the external world. Comte proposes to
describe the necessary, and the actual, filiation of ideas. 1 propose
to describe the necessary, and the actual, filiation of things. Comte
professes to interpret the genesis of our knowledge of nature. My
aim is to interpret, as far as it is possible, the genesis of the phenom-
ena which constitute nature. The one end is subjective. The other
is objective.

Spencer rejected the idea of uniform, linear progress, in the
light of which

the different forms of society presented by savage and civilised

races all over the globe, ate but different stages in the evolution of

one form.®

In his view the truth was

that social types, like types of individual organisms, do not form a
series, but are classifiable only in divergent and re-divergent groups.”

45

Finally, Spencer posed the question of the relation of the
individual and the social whole quite differently to Comte.

2. The Subject-matter of Sociology

Spencer did not provide a developed, formal definition of
sociology or of its relation to other social sciences. But in The
Study of Sociology he paid much attention to demonstrating
the possibility of its existence as a science. This possibility
depended on the existence (1) of a universal law of ‘natural
causality’ which operated in society to the same extent’as in
nature, and (2) of a regular connection of the elements and
structure of any phenomenon. By examining in detail the ob-
jective and subjective difficulties (including class prejudices)
of shaping sociology as a science, Spencer anticipated a number
of the theses of the future sociology of knowledge.

The most complicated methodological task for him was to
demarcate sociology from history. When studying the laws of
the development of society, sociology is, in spirit, a historical
science. But in Spencer’s opinion, it was related to traditional,
naffative, descriptive history in the same way as anthropology
to biography. While biography recorded all the chance circum-
stances in a human life, anthropology studied the state and
conditions of the development of the organism. In the same way
sociology, even though it rested on historical facts, was closer
methodologically to biology.

In contrast to Comte, Spencer not only set out his under-
standing of the subject-matter and tasks of sociology but also,
in fact, realised the principles he proclaimed. His Principles of
Sociology was essentially the first attempt to construct an
integral sociological system on ethnographic material. Under the
heading ‘The Data of Sociology’ he tried to reconstruct theoret-
ically the physical, emotional, intellectual, and especially the
religious life of primitive man, and to bring out the origin of
his main ideas and notions. Later, as ‘the inductions of sociol-
ogy’, which consisted in a kind of general theory of society, he
analysed the concepts of society, social growth, social structure,
social functions, various systems and organs of social life. In
the second volume of Principles of Sociology he examined,

46

employing an immense amount of ethnographic material, albeit
uncritically assembled, the evolution of domestic relations
(primitive sexual relations, forms of the family, the position
of women and children), ritual institutions (including customs),
political institutions (under which he examined not only polit-
ical institutions proper, ie., the state, representative institu-
tions, courts, and law, but also property, types of society,
religious institutions, public professions, and industrial institu-
tions, ie., production, exchange, division of labour, etc.).
His sociology was thus an all-embracing science that included
anthropology, ethnography, and a general theory of historical
development.

3. Organicism and Evolutionism

Spencer’s sociological theory was built around two main princi-
ples: the conception of society as an organism and the idea of
social evolution. The first principle was connected with the
necessity of comprehending the unity of the social whole.

He clearly asked himself the following question, whether
society was a real ‘entity’, or only a collective name for des-
ignating a certain number of individuals, which had only a
nominal existence. Since the nominalist point of view on so-
ciety was unacceptable to him, he had to admit that society
was a special kind of entity that really existed. He suggested
that we have every right to regard it as a special entity, because,
although it was made up of discrete units, the constant main-
tenance of a certain general similarity in the grouping of these
units within the locality occupied by each society over the
course of several generations and even centuries, however,
indicated a certain concreteness of the aggregate formed by
them. It was this feature that gave us our idea of society. Be-
cause we do not give this name to the transient gatherings
that primitive peoples form, but only employ it where a settled
life has led to a certain permanence in the distribution of its
components within society.

But, if society was a real object, with its own individuality,
should it be classed as inorganic or organic? Although Spencer
widely employed mechanical analogies (society as an ‘aggregate’,

47

etc.) they seemed unsatisfactory to him for constructing a gener-
alised model of the social whole, and he called an organic
model to his aid that was more complex and dynamic. One of
the chapters of Principles of Sociology was entitled ‘A Society
Is an Organism”.

Spencer listed a number of similarities between biological
and social organisms: (1) society, like a biological organism, and
in contrast to inorganic matter, grew and increased in size dur-
ing the greater part of its existence (for example, the conversion
of small states into empires); (2) as a society grew its structure
became more complicated, just like the structure of an organism
during biological evolution; (3) the differentiation of structure
in both biological and social organisms was accompanied with a
similar differentiation of functions; (4) the differentiation of
the structure and functions of biological and social organisms
was accompanied during evolution with development of their
interaction; (5) the analogy between society and the organism
could be reversed; one could say that each organism is a society
consisting of separate individuals; (6) in a society, as in an or-
ganism, even when life as a whole stopped, the separate com-
ponent parts could continue to live, at least for a certain time.
All that, in his opinion, allowed one to treat human society by
analogy with a biological organism.

But he also saw essential differences between them. (1) The
component parts of a biological organism formed a concrete
whole in which all the elements were inseparably united, while a
society was a discrete whole, the living elements of which were
more or less free and dispersed. (2) The differentiation of func-
tions in an individual organism was such that the capacity to
feel and think was concentrated in certain of its parts alone,
while in a society consciousness was spread throughout the
whole aggregate, and all its units were capable of enjoyment and
suffering to approximately the same extent, if not equally.
Hence a third difference: in a living organism the elements
existed for the sake of the whole; in a society, on the contrary,

the welfare of the aggregate, considered apart from that of the units,
is not an end to be sought. The society exists for the benefit of its
members; not its members for the benefit of the society. It has ever
to be remembered that great as may be the efforts made for the

48

prosperity of the body politic, yet the claims of the body politic
are nothing in themselves, and become something only in so far as
they embody the claims of its component individuals.®

The reservations introduced were most essential for Spencer,
who repeatedly protested against the idea of the full identity of
society and organism attributed to him (although he himself had
given grounds for same). One must not forget that he was an
individualist. Whereas the social whole, for Comte, preceded the
individual, and the latter was not even an independent cell of
society, for Spencer, on the contrary, society was only an aggre-
gate of individuals. He considered dissolution of the individual
in the social organism to be impermissible. Hence, also, the im-
portant refinement, that society was not simply an organism
but a ‘superorganism’.

Any developed society, according to Spencer, had three
systems of organs. The supporting system was the organisation
of the parts that provided nutrition in a living organism, but was
the production of necessary products in a society. The distribut-
ing system ensured connection of the different parts of the
social organism through the division of labour. Finally, the
regulatory system, in the person of the state, ensured subordina-
tion of the parts to the whole. The specific parts of “organs”
of society were institutions. Spencer counted six types of in-
stitution: domestic, ritual, political, church, professional, and
industrial. He endeavoured to trace the evolution of each of
them by means of a comparative, historical analysis. But what
were the laws of this evolution?

The concept of evolution had a central place in Spencer’s
theory. According to him, phenomena occurring anywhere
were part of the general process of evolution. There was only
one evolution, and it took place in the same way everywhere.

Any process of development, according to him, included
two aspects: integration and differentiation. It began with
simple, quantitative growth, increase in the size or number of
the component elements. The quantitative growth and compli-
cation of the structure of social aggregates entailed a process of
functional and structural differentiation of the whole. In primi-
tive social organisms their separate parts and functions were
weakly differentiated and similar to one another. One and the

49
4-1147

same partial structure could perform several different social
functions in them, and one and the same function could be
performed by several different structures. As society grew its
parts became more and more unlike one another. These dissim-
ilar parts began to perform ever more different, specialised
functions, which had to be co-ordinated.

The division of labour, discovered first by economists as
a social phenomenon, and later also recognised by biologists as
a ‘physiological division of labour’, was thus a universal mechan-
ism of development. But the more differentiated functions
were, the more important became the existence of a certain
regulating, governing mechanism capable of co-ordinating the
partial structures. Hence the complication and differentiation
of the regulating processes themselves. In the earliest stages of
social evolution a differentiation had already begun between
tulers and governed, which gradually became more and more
marked. The power of the ruler was supplemented by a religious
authority arising simultaneously with it and by the power of
generally accepted rules of behaviour and customs which
gradually became differentiated from both of them.

So that beginning with a barbarous tribe, almost if not quite homo-
geneous in the functions of its members, the progress has been,
and still is, towards an economic aggregation of the whole human
race; growing ever more heterogeneous in respect of the separate
functions assumed by the local sections of each nation, the separate
functions assumed by the many kinds of makers and traders in each
town, and the separate functions assumed by the workers united in
producing each commodity.°

The evolutionary approach to society, however, raised a
number of complex problems. (1) What was the relation of
quantitative and qualitative changes in the process of develop-
ment? (2) What was the relation of the concepts of evolution
and progress (a problem already posed by the romantics of the
end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries)? (3) Should
the evolution of society be regarded as a single, unidirectional
process, or as a series of relatively autonomous processes of
development?

Spencer answered the first of these questions in the spirit

50

of typical ‘flat evolutionism’. Social evolution, for him, was a
contradictory, but mainly smooth, gradual, and largely automat-
ic process that did not permit of conscious ‘acceleration’ and
‘outside’ interference; ‘the processes of growth and develop-
ment may be, and very often are, hindered or deranged, though
they cannot be artificially bettered’.!° That was a direct sub-
stantiation of the spontaneity of the development of capitalist
society, and of maintenance of the status quo. By stressing the
organic character of social evolution, and drawing numerous
analogies between society and nature, Spencer sharply con-
demned any attempts at a revolutionary reorganisation, seeing
in revolutionary destruction of definiteness an unnatural breach
of the law that any evolution ‘follows lines of least resist-
ance’!

Spencer’s position as regards the relation of evolution and
progress, was much more complicated. He concerned himself
much with this matter. The idea of the universality of progress,
understood as the perfecting of man and society, was common
in the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘Ameliorism’, the
philosophy of the gradual improvement of life, was an inal-
ienable part of the social credo of Victorian liberalism. Young
Spencer also delimited progress as a value concept, and evolu-
tion in a natural-science sense. In the second chapter of Social
Statics he had stressed that

progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity... so surely
must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely
must man become perfect.! ?

But later he turned away from this point of view, and the
very concept of progress, considering the term too anthropo-
centric. When speaking of the ‘law of evolution’, the mature
Spencer already had in mind not ‘improvement of life’ but only
the regular, law-governed, and ever accelerating movement from
homogeneity to heterogeneity. He no longer claimed that
‘universal progress’ applied to any given society. He was quite
conscious of the possibility and even inevitability of regressive
Processes. He understood that if the theory of regress, in its
current form, should be considered bankrupt, the theory of
Progress, too, applied without limitations, would seem unsound.

Si
4*

It was very possible, and even very probable, that regress took
place as often as progress. Hence, the notion of the development
of society no longer as global Evolution but as a series of rela-
tively autonomous processes. Like other types of progress, he
stressed, social progress was not linear, but divergent.

As Perrin justly noted, Spencer had not one but at least
four interpretations of ‘social evolution’: (1) ‘as progress toward
an ideal ‘‘social state” ’; (2) ‘as the differentiation of social
aggregates into functional subsystems’; (3) ‘as an advancing
division of labor’; and (4) ‘as the origin of species of socie-
ties’.'? He never succeeded in combining them all.

4. Spencer’s Place in the History of Sociology

Spencer’s contribution to the development of sociology, and the
evaluation of his works by succeeding generations have been as
contradictory as his creative work.

His ideologically important service was his fight against
clericalism and defence of the principles of objective investiga-
tion of society based on the principles of scientific research.
Progressive thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury were attracted by his confidence in the irresistibility of
social evolution, his recognition of the law-governed character
of everything that exists, and the seeming rigour and scientific
character of his conclusions. It was not by chance that these
ideas impressed such people as Jack London and Theodore
Dreiser.

But Spencer’s agnosticism also opened the road to compro-
mise with religion, while his sociological doctrine had a bour-
geois individualist and antisocialist character and was easily
converted (in Spencer himself, and his followers) into a direct
apology for capitalism. It was not for nothing that Spencerism
was warmly welcomed in the USA by such pillars of rising
monopoly capital as John D. Rockefeller and James J. Hill.!*

Spencer’s service, as regards theory, was his attempt to com-
bine the historico-evolutionary approach to society with a struc-
tural, functional one. With his conception of structural dif-
ferentiation, and understanding of society as a self-regulating
system, and his analysis of the relation of social functions with

the structure of society, he anticipated many propositions of
structural functionalism in sociology and ethnology. He was
the first in sociology to begin systematic use of the concepts
‘system’, ‘function’, ‘structure’, and ‘institution’. His superior-
ity to Comte was his much more consistent reliance on empir-
ical, above all comparative, historical investigations. He was one
of the first to try and demarcate the concepts of evolution and
progress and overcome the shortcomings of the linear concep-
tion of development, throwing a bridge from sociology to
ethnology. The systematisation of ethnological material that he
carried out, and to an ever greater extent the very mode of
classifying and typologising societies, furthered raising of the
theoretical standard of ethnological research and the appearance
of a number of historico-evolutionary and culturological con-
ceptions. It is not without reason that he has been given an
important place in the history of anthropology and ethnography ,
and psychology. Many of his special observations and conclu-
sions, irrespective of their degree of factual substantiation,
stimulated fruitful scientific discussions and disputes.

On the whole, however, Spencer’s sociological conception
suffered from crude naturalism and mechanicism. He tried, in
the interests of his synthetic philosophy, to reduce complex
social phenomena to their simplest elements. The concrete
content of social life thus escaped his attention. His attempts to
apply the general concepts ‘differentiation’ and ‘integration’ to
society, bypassing formalisation of the concepts, and relying
on pre-scientific definitions of society, personality, and mass,
generated unclarity and misunderstanding.

As Lenin wrote in this connection,

Abstract reasoning about how far the development (and well-being)
of the individual depends on the differentiation of society is quite
unscientific, because no correlation can be established that will suit
every form of social structure. The very concepts ‘differentiation’,
‘heterogeneity’, and so on, acquire absoletely different meanings,
depending on the particular social environment to which they are
applied .!5

For all his thirst for concreteness, Spencer’s theory of evolu-
tion remained speculative. Empirical facts illustrated the con-

53

ception, but it was not based on them. The vast factual material
contained in the 17 volumes of his Descriptive Sociology was
selected by his assistants quite uncritically and from different
sources. ©

While outwardly describing the cultural and functional
connections of the social whole, Spencer’s organic model
of society did not disclose its real foundations. He did not
see either the dialectic of the productive forces and relations
of production or the basic position of the latter as regards
politico-ideological phenomena. He treated the leading role of
the social division of labour in the forming of classes in a
conservative, protective spirit, and ascribed an exclusively
destructive role to class struggle. Furthermore, he also could not
theoretically resolve the contradictions between organicism and
individualism.

The contradictoriness of his influence on sociological thought
follows from that. Although not recognised by official univer-
sity science, his sociology had acquired great popularity at the
end of the nineteenth century among a broad readership, es-
pecially in the United States, where nearly 369,000 copies of his
books were sold between 1860 and 1902.!7 According to
Charles Cooley, Spencer’s The Study of Sociology ‘probably did
more to arouse interest in the subject than any other publica-
tion before or since’.!® Spencer’s visit to the USA in 1882 was
a real triumph. His influence on U.S. social thought became less
marked in the early twentieth century, not so much because
his ideas had reached their limit as because his language had
become (as Hofstadter put it), ‘a standard feature of the folk-
lore of individualism’ .1?

The attitude to him, however, was never unequivocal. He was
seen at first mainly as a theorist of naturalistic evolutionism;
he enjoyed his greatest influence among spokesmen of social
Darwinism (W.G.Sumner). Proponents of a psychological
onentation, on the contrary, criticised him for his naturalism.
The crisis of evolutionism at the turn of the century evoked
sharp criticism of Spencer. But Durkheim had already seen in
him the forerunner of the functionalist trend. According to
Luther Bernard’s poll, 258 American sociologists in 1927
considered Spencer the most influential European sociologist. °
Later, however, he was cited less and less. In 1937 Talcott

Parsons unambiguously wrote: ‘Spencer is dead’?! Historians
of sociology of 1940-50 agreed with that. The advent of neo-
evolutionism, on the one hand, and of cybernetics and the
systems approach, on the other, again raised interest in the
West in him, and he was seen as a precursor of these new cur-
rents, although they were not born, of course, on foundation
of Spencerism.

Notes

‘1 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics; or the Conditions Essential to
Human Happiness (Appleton & Co., New York, 1882), p 105.

2 [bid., p 94.

3 Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (Henry S, King & Co.,
London, 1875), p 328.

* Ibid., p 330.

5 Herbert Spencer. An Autobiography, Vol. 2 (Watts & Co., London,
1926), p 488.

® Herbet Spencer. The Study of Sociology, p 329.

7 Ibid.

® Herbert Spencer. The Principles of Sociology, Vol. 1 (Williams and
Norgate, London, 1885), pp 449-450.

° Herbert Spencer. First Principles (Williams and Norgate, London,
1890), pp 346-347.

1° Herbert Spencer. The Study of Sociology, p 401.

11 Herbert Spencer. First Principles, p 239.

1? Herbert Spencer. Social Statics, p 80.

43 Robert C. Perrin. Herbert Spencer’s Four Theories of Social
Evolution, In: The American Journal of Sociology, 1976, 81, 6: 1339-
1359,

14 Richard Hofstadter. Social Darwinism in American Thought
(The Beacon Press, Boston, Mass., 1955).

18 VI, Lenin. The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism
of It in Mr. Struve’s Book. Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1986), p 412.

16 See: Robert G. Perrin. Art. cit.

'T Richard Hofstadter. Op. cit., p 34.

55

*® Charles H. Cooley. Reflections upon the Sociology of Herbert
Spencer. In: The American Journal of Sociology, 1920, 26,2: 129.

1® Richard Hofstadter. Op. cit., p 50.

2° D.N. Levine, E. B. Carter, and E, M. Gorman. Simmel’s Influence
on American Sociology. In: The American Journal of Sociology, 1976,
81, 4: 840, 841.

7! Talcott Parsons. The Structure of Social Action (The Free Press,
Glencoe, Ill., 1949), p 3.

4

NATURALISM IN SOCIOLOGY OF THE TURN
OF THE CENTURY

Alexander Hofman and Alexander Kovalev

1. Evolutionism—the Basis of the Naturalistic
Schools of Sociology

The middle and second half of the nineteenth century was a
time in the intellectual history of Europe of an almost universal
enthusiasm for the advances of natural science and the flourish-
ing of the positivist-naturalistic outlook, under whose deter-
minant influence the sociology of the time developed.

Darwin’s theory of evolution forced scientists to pay atten-
tion to the simple fact (previously ignored because of the
dominance of the theological outlook), that there was not
only a difference between man and animals but also a similarity,
that man was the product of a long biological evolution and one
of the links in its chain. The theory of evolution became a main
factor in the ideological climate of the second half of the cen-
tury. Evolutionism, as the leading trend of the social thought
of the time, was based on the ideas of the unity of the laws of
the history of nature and of man, the unity of the method of
the natural and social sciences, so undermining providentialist
and finalist explanations of development.

Evolutionism closely linked sociology with ethnology, solv-
ing their common problems of the genesis of society and cul-
ture. To that was due the exceptional attention of sociology
then to primitive history and comparative study of the origin
and development of the social institutions of peoples without

57

a written language, whose culture was transmitted predomi-
nantly by oral tradition. The idea of the intrinsically determined
natural evolution of human society was given its classical form
in the historical and ethnological works of E. B. Tylor (1832-
1917).

Social evolution began to be regarded in the biologico-
evolutionary schools as a continuation or component of biolog-
ical evolution. Spokesmen of this trend suggested that there
was an organic law of the development of social institutions
simililar to the law governing the growth of organism, that de-
termined the gradual, regular character of their changes, iden-
tical for the whole world. The influence of this linear concep-
tion of social evolution was strengthened by the fact of Dar-
win’s evolutionary ideas having long had an effect on sociology
through the medium of Spencer’s philosophical evolutionism
and its universal ‘hypothesis of development’ and principle of
differentiation.

Evolutionary sociology also inherited from social philos-
ophy a metaphysical posing of the problem of the ‘prime mov-
ers’ of history. The positivistically oriented naturalistic trends,
which were united by an approach to society as a part of nature
governed by its universal Jaws, endeavoured to make this con-
cept to some extent empirical, and began to explain the de-
velopment of society by the action of certain determinant
factors understood as natural objective forces. But the concept
of a factor remained in general polysemous and contradictory,
not least because of the uncritical empiricism of these trends.
In spite of the positive significance of the quest for natural
laws of social development, and of the orientation on objective
science, which undermined the positions of voluntarism, the
cult of great men, and theological and spiritualist conceptions
in sociology, the weak point of naturalistic evolutionist sociol-
ogy was precisely the one-sided naturalisation (usually biolog-
ical) of social ‘forces’ and ‘factors’ to the detriment of under-
standing history as a process of human activity.

The bringing to the fore of certain natural factors or driving
forces of social development and sometimes of methodological
models of a certain natural science, is the basis for classifying
the naturalistic schools.

58

2. The Mechanistic School

The prestige of the methodology of classical natural science in
sociology, and the influence of the mechanistic understanding
of the world and of vulgar materialist tendencies on it, are most
clearly seen in the mechanistic school, which was the latest
ideological basis for many naturalistic trends.

Sociological conceptions that equate social processes and
phenomena with physical ones, and employ the concepts of
mechanics, physics in the broad sense, energetics, etc., to ex-
plain the social world, can be conditionally assigned to the
mechanistic school.

Mechanists developed an understanding of society as a statis-
tical aggregate of parts (in contrast to the organic concep-
tion of society), the prototype of which was the concept of a
mechanism as distinct from a living organism. The ‘aggregate’
conception of society encouraged application of statistical
methods in sociology based on a corresponding concept of a
whole.

Quantitative data and graphic presentations of them were
widely employed by the American economist and sociologist
H.C. Carey (1793-1879), author of one of the first developed
mechanistic theories in nineteenth-century sociology.

Carey’s principal sociological works, the three volumes of
The Principles of Social Science (1858-60) and Unity of Law
(1872), shared the monism and principles of Spencer’s mech-
anistic evolution.

Following the reductionist logic of mechanism, Carey looked
for simple laws governing matter in all its forms and identically
true for physical and social sciences, differing only in the ob-
jects of their application and mode of expression. The physical
laws of gravity, attraction, and repulsion, for example, received
corresponding social forms of the association and concentration
of population. For Carey man was a molecule of society, and
association a variety of the ‘great law of molecular attraction’.
He often resorted in his reasoning to naive mechanistic generali-
Sations and analogies, greatly exaggerating their explanatory
force. It was obvious, in his view, from the principle of the in-
destructibility of matter, that production and consumption
were simple conversions of matter, trade and commerce the

59

shifting of matter in space, and so on.

The revolution in science at the beginning of the twentieth
century did not prevent attempts to explain the social in a quan-
titative, mechanistic way. Certain naturalists, in particular the
eminent chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932), developed a
‘physiosociology’.

In his Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft,'
Ostwald suggested that energetics could provide the social
sciences with certain fundamental heuristic principles, though
not all the explanations they were in need of. The cultural proc-
ess, from the very general, energetic point of view, was a trans-
formation of free energy into bound. The greater the amount
of bound energy obtained in this transformation, the more
significant the progress of culture was.

This universal criterion, based on the laws of the dissipation
of energy and growth of entropy, made it possible not only to
measure social progress but also to measure the increase in the
viability (progress) of an organism or biological species as a
whole, which followed from the fundamental unity of the world
evolutionary process. Evolution was characterised by a mount-
ing differentiation and complication of the organisation and
functions of an organism, animal species, human group, society,
etc. The ultimate argument for social progress, Ostwald suggest-
ed, was that, because of the gradual perfecting of the organisa-
tion of the human groups, man made increasingly better use of
the free energy of the world, which happened in two ways that
seemed to be the essence of social evolution, viz., the division
and combination of labour.

Ostwald translated other sociological and economic catego-
ries (in particular social order and the state), regarded as condi-
tions of the best transformation of energy, into the language of
energism in the same way.

The authority of mathematical natural science helped spread
the mechanistic type of thinking in the early part of this cen-
tury. Ideas of social physics were developed in one way or
another by Vladimir Bekhterev, Vilfredo Pareto, and others.

Theorists less competent in natural science simply introduced
any laws of physics, mechancis, chemistry, and biology that
they knew or considered appropriate into the explanation of
social phenomena. It was a common fault of the mechanistic

60

school to ‘dress up’ current popular ideas of sociology and the
philosophy of history in a physical terminology, which gave rise
only to pseudo-explanations. Such were the attempts at a ‘ther-
modynamic’ interpretation of history, which sometimes em-
ployed physical theories, mistaken, but popular in their day,
like that of ‘the thermal death of the universe’. Motion, life,
change, and history existed while there was inequality of
energy. A state of social entropy in the future as a dead, inert
equality, like the thermal death of the universe, was predicted
from the thermodynamic laws of the constancy of the quantity
of energy and the irreversibility of the transfer of energy from
a higher level to a lower. The conservative romantics’ old his-
tory-of-philosophy conception will be readily recognised in this
energetics clothing.

Many of the theories of mechanists logically infringed the
law of the adequacy (equality of number) of subject and pred-
icate. The statements of Carey and other ‘social physicists’ about
energy and gravitation, for example, were made as if they
specially applied to social phenomena, whereas they were applic-
able to a much broader class of phenomena and to all objects of
a physical nature. As a result the really specific features of the
social world that belong to it alone were lost sight of.

Certain aspects of the heritage of the mechanistic school
found reflection, however, in attempts to employ cybernetics
and the general theory of systems in sociology from the stand-
point of the tendencies of modern science to bring fields of
knowledge closer together that are very remote from one
another, and to look for universal principles and analogies of
them, and for a structural community of heterogeneous systems
and phenomena. As proponents of quantitative analysis in so-
ciology the mechanists made a significant contribution to
the theory of social measurement and statistics by creating a
method of numerical estimates of the scale of man’s transforma-
tion of natural energy into socio-economic energy.

3. The Geographical School

The socio-philosophical idea evolved from a global comparison
of society and nature into a special study of the influence of

61

various environmental factors (climate, relief, natural wealth,
etc.) on separate social processes and phenomena (growth of
population, the productive forces, the political system, etc.).

Reflections on the significance of the geographical environ-
ment for human society went to two logical extremes. Pro-
ponents of mechanical geographical determinism asserted that
all man’s activity was exclusively governed and conditioned by
his natural surroundings. Exponents of absolute cultural deter-
minism claimed that culture determined the very perception of
the environment and its significance for man, and therefore that
the explanation of human activity should be culturological;
they underestimated the fact that people’s cultural possibili-
ties and opportunities are still different in different natural
conditions. The denial of any influence of the environment,
reduced to the absurd, led to a kind of socio-cultural solipcism.
It is important to emphasise that the geographical trend in so-
cial thought did not in any way coincide with narrow geograph-
ical determinism, which was only a part of it. Attempts had
already been made in the nineteenth century at a ‘systems’ (as
we now call it) way out of the difficulties generated by dichot-
omies of the type of ‘man—nature’, and ‘culture—environment’,
by treating man, culture, and the environment as a whole, as a
single characteristic of a geographical region. Man had firmly
become a part of nature for science, and not a divine exception
to it.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, an excessively
broad interpretation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection
became the prototype of a theory of the unidirectional evolu-
tion of social structures depending on the geographical environ-
ment. The theory of geographical determinism was very broadly
accepted then and seemed well grounded from the scientific
point of view. A useful result of this theorising after the manner
of biology was the attention given to the areal distribution of
population, and to human ecology (in which one can see rudi-
ments of today’s social ecology).

Natural factors like climate, soils, relief, the distribution of
water resources and minerals, flora and fauna, geophysical and
cosmic processes, the change of the seasons, and so on, also
came into the field of view of social geography and the geo-
graphical currents in sociology. The following were regarded as

62

-

among the principal social phenomena that depended on these

factors: (a) the distribution and density of population over the
globe, and its health and fertility; (b) physical and psychological
racial differences in constitution, temperament, forms of moral-
ity, frequency of cases of great talent, etc.; (c) types of occupa-
tion and economic activity, the organisation, rhythm, and cycles
of the latter, and the population’s level of prosperity and well-
being; (d) types of socio-political organisation, social institu-
tions, and marriage; (e) possibilities of cultural contacts and
borrowings, rates of economic and cultural development;
(f) religion, mythology, art and literature—in short almost all
the manifestations of social life.

Both positivist history and philosophy, and geography, pro-
moted the forming of a geographical school in sociology in the
nineteenth century. The credo of geographical determinism,
fascinated by the methodology of classical natural science,
was formulated for a long time by the eclectic French philoso-
pher Victor Cousin (1792-1867):

Give me the map of a country, its configuration, climate, waters,
winds, and all its physical geography; give me its natural products,
its flora, its zoology, and I will undertake to tell you @ priori what
the man of that country will be like, and what role that country
will play in history, not accidentally but necessarily; not in this
period, but in all; and, finally, the idea it is called on to represent!”

Naturalism and geographical pseudodeterminism had pene-
trated all branches of the social sciences then, even systems of
an idealist hue. From the middle of the century a solar-meteoro-
logical theory flourished in religious studies (Max Miiller and
others) that interpreted myths as allegories of astronomical and
atmospheric phenomena and traced the sources of faith and
gods to majestic natural catastrophes. Ernest Renan argued
about the ‘spirit of monotheism’ in the desert landscape. And
Hippolyte Taine explained, in his Philosophie de l'art, the dif-
ference between Florentine and Flemish painting, for example,
by differences in the geographical conditions of Italy and the
Low Countries.

The English positivist historian Henry Buckle (1821-1862),
trying to substantiate the objective pattern of historical develop-

63

ment, adduced numerous, at first glance, plausible examples
of how a specific landscape, climate, soil fertility, and nutri-
tion determined differences in consciousness, physique, accumu-
lation of wealth between nations, and later in social organisation
and ultimately in historical destinies.» He made the reserva-
tion, however, that mental factors gradually acquired superior-
ity over physical ones at the highest levels of development. His
ideas affected certain trends in economic geography and sociol-
ogy, whose spokesmen claimed it was enough to know a so-
ciety’s natural wealth, energy sources, and natural lines of com-
munication, to define the character and volume of its produc-
tion, its main economic functions, etc.

Buckle ignored a number of intermediate relationships
between the social factors themselves, and the functional rela-
tions between them and the environment when drawing conclu-
sions about the direct, unambiguous dependence of economic,
psychic, and social facts on the physical environment. At the
same time he tacitly or openly adopted, as a general scientific
ideal, physical monism and mechanistic determinism and their
notions of the human mind’s passive copying of the external
world. He underestimated, moreover, the results of cultural
diffusion and mutual influence, since he often depicted the
effect of the environment as if a society always lived in com-
plete isolation, as a culturally independent entity.

Geographers, who shared many of the mistakes of positivist
historiography, also endeavoured to bring out the role of
physical factors of the environment in the development of so-
ciety.

One eminent sociogeographer was Karl Ritter (1779-1859),
who is considered a founder of modern geography along with
Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859). His methodology was based
on the idea of an interaction of nature and culture, and of the
interconnected nature of all the elements that formed a histori-
cally concrete geographical region.* The land was a single ‘organ-
ism’, divided into internally linked, integrated regions. A correct
determination of the boundaries of these regions called for a
thorough description of the landscape and relief, climate, vege-
tation (especially the cultivated vegetation), the animal king-
dom, and man in his historical interaction with these elements
of the environment, etc.

4

The philosophical organicism of the German romantics and
their belief in a world order that united polar relations in a
higher synthesis was the basis of Ritter’s world outlook, rather
than naturalism.

His significance for the social sciences was due to man and
history having an important place in his geography. In his view
geography should explain how man influenced the space he in-
habited, and how he himself was ‘brought up’ and ‘educated’ by
working in favourable or harsh conditions. The periods of
maximum cultural flowering of each region had a special in-
terest for him, because, in his view, the highest degree of har-
mony between nature and culture was attained then.

Problems that were later differentiated, and became the sub-
ject-matter of investigation in various fields of geography and
sociology, were organically merged in Ritter’s work. After him
there was a clearly marked tendency to split geography into two
parts, physical geography, and social or anthropogeography, in
which economic, political, historical, cultural, and statistical
geographies made their appearance in turn at various times in
different countries.

Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), the German zoologist, travel-
ler, journalist, and sociologist, a professor of Leipzig University,
played a leading role in shaping anthropogeography and, in
particular, political geography.°

He defined the subject-matter of anthropogeography, in line
with the general tradition of the century, as study of the human
tace to the extent that the latter’s vital manifestations were
determined by the geographical environment. Ratzel, a biologist
by education, strove to unite the methods and concepts of biol-
ogy, ethnography, and geography in accordance with the ideol-
ogy of naturalism. He considered that anthropogeography
should be part of a general biogeography and should employ
the usual, ordinary ecological and evolutionary concepts when
studying political and economic development.

His Politische Geographie (1897) combined a scientific
description of the differentiation of cultures in accordance with
the properties of the geographical environment with biologiser
speculations, especially when explaining the areal expansion or
contraction of states. And he had an inherent mistaken ten-
dency, typical of geographical determinism, to see direct causal

65
$~1147

connections between the properties of the natural environment
and human practice, bypassing the mediating social links and
mechanisms.

He divided all the consequences of the influence of the en-
vironment into static (fixed in the main in the constant bio-
psychic properties of individuals) and dynamic (the changing
historical results of socio-political organisation). The direct
effect of geographical factors lasting for millennia, especially of
climate and spatial situation, were the cause of somatic and
psychic differences between groups of people living in different
territories. Mountains and spatial seclusion, for example, de-
veloped traditionalism in people, and narrow nationalism, while
plains and seas developed such psychic features as a nostalgia
for space and a spirit of expansion and bold initiative. Natural
boundaries (mountains and seas) promoted the development of
isolated social groups with an underdeveloped political author-
ity, while plains promoted centralisation and a strong authority
for defence against the raids of nomads, which later carried over
into a strong socially and culturally integrated state organisa-
tion. The spread of languages and culture was governed by the
same laws.

States functioned as living organisms subject to natural
processes of growth and decay, and as such could not be con-
fined to rigid boundaries. Area, space (Raum), and location
(Lage) were necessary factors for the rise of states. The survival
of nations or cultures was linked with their capacity for expan-
sion and improvement of their geographical position.

It was only a step from that to conversion of the biological
analogies into a political ideology. That step was taken by the
so-called school of German geopolitics headed by Karl Haus-
hofer (1869-1946), who created a ‘teaching’ of allegedly geo-
graphically determined trends in the development and expansion
of states.° The notorious arguments about Germany’s lack of
‘living space’ (Lebensraum), and the unnaturalness of her po-
litical boundaries employed to justify fascist aggression were
drawn from the arsenal of geopolitics.’ The author of the term
‘geopolitics’, the Swedish sociologist Rudolf Kjellén (1864-
1922) also interpreted it, under the influence of Ratzel, as a
doctrine of the state as a geographical organism, eclectically
combining concepts of geographical determinism, social Darwin-

66

ism, biological, organic, racial and anthropological theories.®

A very typical feature of vulgar geographical determinism in
the explanation of historical events was the broad enlistment of
trite ‘psychological truths’ of common sense as intermediate
factors. That in particular distinguished many political geogra-
phers who employed, as needed, both age-old prejudices and the
‘latest’ racial inventions about the ‘spirit of the people’ alleged
to be moulded by the geographical environment.

The content of political geography, however, was not just
dubious pseudogeographical explanations and forecasts of po-
litical events, willy-nilly covering up certain political sympathies.
Many political geographers made substantial historical studies of
the formation, expansion, and decline of various ‘political
zones’ and their administrative centres, frontiers, and defence
lines. There was sense in asking how to appraise the ‘political
potential’ latent in the interaction of a political community and
its environment. In the West political geography successfully
studied the influence of political power on the physical and
social aspects of the landscape, the shaping of linguistic and
cultural associations, and other topics.

In the early part of this century American environmentalism
bacame the continuer of the old geographical trend in the social
sciences. What was relatively new in it was a partiality for
statistical and other ‘rigorous’ methods of testing the popular
hypotheses of geographical determinism. Ellen Semple, the
founder of environmentalism, an orthodox populariser of
Ratzel, developed the idea of the physical environment’s ‘con-
trol’ over man’s life activity in a certain territory.”

A leading spokesman of environmentalism was the American
geographer, Ellsworth Huntington (1876-1947), a geologist by
education. Employing the methods and data (often unreliable)
of statistics, paleobotany, climatology, history, demography,
and other sciences, he endeavoured to substantiate the existence
of close correlations between changes (‘pulsations’) of climate
and the progress or decline of civilisations.!°

Huntington established the following mediating links:
(1) climate influenced a population’s health (to estimate this he
studied the coincidence of monthly curves of mortality and
temperature, and relied on contemporaneous experimental
research, etc.); (2) climate influenced physical and mental ac-

67
5*

tivity, and labour productivity, and consequently caused fluctua-
tions of the business and economic variables of society (his main
empirical basis for that was data on the parallelism of the death
rate and the cycles of business slumps and booms); (3) insofar
as civilisation was a function of the energy and productivity of
a nation, favourable or adverse fluctuations of climate deter-
mined the growth, decline, and shifting of civilisations.

Huntington also developed old ideas of the gradual geo-
graphical shifting of civilisations from the Afro-Asian cradle to
the colder and more varied climate of North-Western Europe.
The theory of the ‘northern drift of civilisation’ had already
been defended in various versions-by the Frenchmen Camille
Vallaux,!1 Pierre Mougeolle,’? Edmond Demolins, and many
others. But the criteria for compiling the comparative maps and
correlations by which Huntington consolidated this theory,
were extremely subjective and Europe-centred. He based his
ranking of civilisations on ‘activism’, repeating the old prej-
udices (whose source was the works of the fourteenth-century
Arab historian ibn-Khaldun), that a higher culture and more
complex forms of socio-political organisation could only arise in
a temperate climate, and not in a subtropical or polar one. He
suggested that the abundance of the gifts of nature in the sub-
tropics did not call for large outlays of labour and led to the
inertness and laziness of the people of the south, while the
struggle against cold and hunger in a polar climate developed
resignation and left no forces for the development of culture.
In the end the law of the shifting of the focal centres of culture
to the north remained speculative and based on a one-sided
selection of facts. The introduction of elements of technological
determinism also did not save it; Vallaux, for example, saw the
cause of shifts of culture to the north in the development of
techniques to defend man against cold.

The ‘eternal laws’ of Huntington and other environmental-
ists did not stand up to the test of rigorously established facts,
but their many valuable observations and even certain hypoth-
eses got indirect support from specialists (biologists, climatol-
ogists, psychiatrists, etc.). The environmentalists’ attempts to
link business cycles in the economic affairs of society with pe-
tiods of solar activity, for instance, collapsed, but many psy-
chologists and criminologists have noted complex dependences

68

between this activity, fluctuations of atmospheric pressure, and
other climatic phenomena, on the one hand, and physiological
processes, nervous excitability, and through them certain
psychological and social processes, on the other hand. Adolph
Quételet, and later Cesare Lombroso, noted ‘seasonal’ fluctua-
tions of certain crimes. The influence of cosmic and planetary
processes on social psychology was studied in Russia by Chi-

zhevsky’s school.! 9

In modern American sociogeography there is still a striving
toward a rigorous determinism and a quantitative approach, but
in more limited models with a high probability of prediction.
The problematic of environmentalism is not studied on its old
global plane, but more specifically.’ 4

A ‘cultural geography’ was developed in the USA at the end
of the last century, partly as a reaction to environmentalism,
employing the anthropological idea of culture (Alfred Kroeber
and others).!° It paid close attention to man’s activity that
altered his habitat. It regarded the earth’s surface as the imprint
of man’s way of life, and of his historical past, and as material
evidence of the spread of a culture.

An accentuating of the active role of man in his interaction
with nature was particularly characteristic of the tradition of
French sociogeography, beginning with the school of Frédéric
Le Play (1806-1882), one of the founders of modern social
ecology. He put forward a triad formula of the determinant
factors of human life, viz., habitat, work, and family.

The leading spokesmen of Le Play’s school were Henri de
Tourville (1843-1903) and Edmond Demolins (1852-1907).
When the school was compiling its family household mono-
graphs (well known in the history of social research), it neces-
sarily studied the physical geography of the household or so-
ciety: soil, relief, climate, distribution of water, etc. Demolins’
main work Comment la route crée le type social (1901-03),
based on extensive historical material, which was not free of the
usual mistakes of geographical determinism, traced the main
links between geographical location and various characteristics
of social organisation, forms of labour, property, etc. According
to him, their living on plains, for instance, determined the oc-
cupation of pastoralists and the absence of land appropriation
at an early stage of historical development, since it was more

69

important for nomads to be able to travel freely over the plains
than to be owners of land, and also determined other features
of the ‘social type’. Tourville, studying the origin of society of
the Western type, pointed to Scandinavia and its isolated fiords
as a “world laboratory” where a private, particularity type of
man, family, and society could be moulded.

The French ‘possibilists’ were opponents of geographical
pseudodeterminism. Their spokesmen considered that an iden-
tical environment did not exist in reality either for individuals
(by virtue of differences in their reaction to one and the same
natural conditions, and innate properties) or for cultures of dif-
ferent levels of development. Possibilism broke up the static
conception of the environment as given once and for all with no
relation to the active, historical subject. The historicism of this
trend prompted it always to pose the matter concretely: an en-
vironment for what? and for whom? what were the possibilities
of employing a given culture in it?

The founder of the French school of social geography was
the geographer and historian Pau! Vidal de la Blache (1845-
1918), who suggested that it was not a given environment that
determined a way of life but rather the gradual historical
changes that it underwent as a result of a changing way of life.
For him the landscape was not simply the product of a natural
sequence of events but rather the result of man’s labour, which
created new conditions of existence for future generations.! °

The merit of French social geography was its exposure of the
reactionary pseudodeterminism of German geopolitics. The
possibilists showed that the latter often constructed evidence
post factum (from the historical existence of a certain politico-
social phenomenon to the geographical conditions allegedly
responsible for it) and against the facts. Elisée Reclus (1830-
1905) and Leo Mechnikov (1838-1888), who also belonged to
the French school of social geography, had even earlier fought
against the antihuman conclusions and racism of certain trends
of anthropogeography.!”

The weak side of possibilism, compared with American
environmentalism (the crudeness of whose principles it justly
criticised), was its scorning of a quantitative evaluation of the
probabilities that characterised the links of certain cultural
or economic possibilities with the distribution of geographical

70

factors.'® In that sense the methods of contemporary Western
social geography, in both its applied and its quantitative
branches, are closer to environmentalism than to possibilism.!?

In our day, when man’s impact on nature has grown to an
unprecedented extent, the significance of the geographical trend
in the social sciences is becoming increasingly greater. It has
become obvious that this impact can only be successful when it
is governed by the laws of nature and allows for the main links
and relations of the whole; otherwise the adverse consequences
will tell on man himself as part of nature. A continuity is
observable between the geographical trend and present-day
‘human ecology’, which studies the relationship of man and his
environment (in the broad sense), in particular the spatial rela-
tions of people and social organisations.

4. The Racial, Anthropological School

The racial, anthropological trend was ideologically one of the
most reactionary versions of naturalism in sociology. Racism has
existed as a socio-psychological phenomenon since time im-
memorial, but in the nineteenth century it broadly appealed, for
the first time, to the authority of science. The main ideological
functions of this trend were to substantiate the privileges of the
ruling class in the capitalist state, and imperialist colonial expan-
sionism in foreign policy. One must also remember that the
science of races, i.e., physical anthropology, was still in a rudi-
mentary state, and that there was room for various kinds of
myth-making and speculation that converted immature scientif-
ic knowledge into the pseudoscientific, or even antiscientific.

In spite of the host of differences and nuances inherent in
certain racial-anthropological conceptions, they all boiled down
to several basic postulates: (1) that social life and culture were
a product of racial and anthropological factors; (2) that the
races were not equal, and that that was the cause of the inequal-
ity (‘superiority’, ‘deficiency’, ‘danger’) of the corresponding
cultural creations; (3) that people’s social behaviour was wholly
or predominantly determined by biological heredity; (4) that
Tacial mixing (miscegenation) was harmful.

All these theses were first put forward in developed form by

74

fi

the French philosopher, writer, and diplomat Joseph-Arthur
Gobineau (1816-1882) in a four-volume work Essai sur l’inéga-
lité des races humaines.

Gobineau endeavoured to show that social institutions did
not condition the life activity of races but, on the contrary,
were determined by it. They were the consequences, not the
causes, he declared. The central theme of his work was that the
inequality connected with racial differences, and the struggle of
races stemming from it, were the cause of the decline and death
of civilisations.

Being a pessimist he started from the fatal inevitability
of the death of all civilisations, including the European. Misce-
genation (necessarily with participation of the ‘white? race),
which figured initially as a necessary source of the development
of civilisation, subsequently led inevitably to its degeneration
and death. Gobineau’s main assertions were tautological; the
mixing of races figured in his conceptions simultaneously as a
sign of the degeneration of civilisations and as its cause, so that
it turned out that he was in fact concerned with the ‘viability’
of races rather than the ‘viability’ of civilisations, since the
former was the true subject, for him, of the socio-historical
process.

Racism was a direct continuation of Gobineau’s elitist out-
look; he was an opponent of all forms of social equality and
strove to distinguish ‘true’ hierarchies, and of ‘true’ élites within
them. Since racial inequality was most fundamental, initial, and
ineradicable for him, Gobineau brought it to the fore in his ex-
planations of history. He represented the racial hierarchy in the
form of a three-rung ladder, on the top rung of which was the
‘white’ race, on the middle ming the ‘yellow’, and on the bottom
rung the ‘black’. He asserted the superiority of the ‘white’ race,
since its had allegedly been the main role in the creation and
development of all civilisations. But, according to him, there
was a hierarchy within the ‘white’ race, at the pinnacle of which
were the ‘Aryans’.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English Germanophile
(1855-1927), who lived most of his life in Germany, created
another racist ‘historiosophy’. His main work, endlessly repub-
lished in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, was Die Grundlagen des
19 Jahrhunderts, in which he gave a superficial, contradictory,

72

and highly tendentious survey of European history2° The
supreme ‘achievement’ of this history, according to him, was the
creation of ‘teutonic’ culture, the ‘highest’ of all existing cul-
tures. The ‘teutonic’ culture was the heir of the ‘Aryan’, revival
of whose ‘spirit’ he called for.?!

Chamberlain made a highly significant contribution to crea-
tion of the misanthropic myths of German fascism. It was not
without reason that Nazi ‘theorists’ awarded him the title of
‘people’s thinker’ and ‘prophet’ of the Third Reich.??

One version of the racial, anthropological trend was ‘an-
throposociology’. Its main spokesmen were the French anthro-
pologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) and the
German Otto Ammon (1842-1916).

Lapouge considered Gobineau the pioneer of anthropo-
sociology, but he classed Chamberlain as a ‘caricaturist’ of it.?*
Lapouge’s works were based on interpretation of anthropomet-
ric data, primarily a comparative statistical analysis of cranial
indices. (In anthropology the cranial index is the percentage
relation of the maximum width of the head to its maximum
length. It was introduced by the Swedish anatomist Anders
Retzius in the 1840s.) According to Lapouge anthroposociology
‘had for its object study of the reciprocal reactions of race and
the social milieu’.2* Under the influence of social Darwinism
and of the concept of natural selection, he introduced the con-
cept of social selection, six main forms of which he distinguished :
military, political, religious, moral, legal, and economic.”*
All of these ultimately had a pernicious influence on social de-
velopment as a whole, he thought, since the number of members
of the most ‘valuable’ racial type—the dolichoblonds—was
steadily reduced by their effect, and furthermore was threat-
ened with complete extinction. One of Lapouge’s numerous
‘laws’, the ‘law of epochs’, read: ‘the cephalic index has tended
to increase constantly everywhere since prehistoric times’.? °

Lapouge’s profound historical pessimism was linked above all
with that ‘law’, which postulated disappearance of the ‘best’.
In another ‘law’ he tried to establish a universal link between a
person’s cranial index and his class connection.?”

Similar theses are to be met in the other spokesman of the
anthroposociological school, Otto Ammon, who made a number
of anthropometric studies among army recruits and students.

73

In his Die Gesellschaftsordnung und Ihre natirlichen Grund-
lagen (1896) he endeavoured to combine the principles of so-
cial Darwinism and racism in the analysis of social institu-
tions.?8

The artificiality of the constructs of anthroposociologists
showed up very obviously when they were compelled to ascribe
outstanding brachicephalic people, whose existence refuted
the ‘laws’ of anthroposociology, to ‘a brachycephalic error’.??

The works of Ludwig Woltmann (1871-1907) contained an
attempt to synthesise racism and social Darwinism. His many
books were distinguished by a crude primitivism and a frank
parodying of science in order to substantiate the myth of the
superiority of the ‘Germanic’ race. His conceptions were no
more than a rationalisation of initial racial prejudices.

In proclaiming the necessity of developing society by ‘cul-
tivating’ races, the proponents of the racial, anthropological
trend called for provision of the most favourable conditions,
ie., privileges, for the ‘highest’ race, represented either by the
‘highest’ social strata or by ‘chosen’ peoples. In other words
their endeavours to put anthropological factors at the service
of society and culture concealed its opposite: society and
culture should serve a certain ‘race’. Since the real facts, more-
over, did not confirm the racist postulates, the concept ‘race’
was given a symbolic sense, rather than being interpreted as an
aggregate of real physico-anthropological attributes. All of that
made racial, anthropological conceptions a handy instrument
of the home and foreign policy of imperialism and fascism.

While treating social processes as the product and inverted
form of the ‘blood game’, the racial-anthropological trends
was not only a reactionary current within sociology but was
also, essentially, an antisociology, because the subject-matter
of sociology, society, was itself dissolved in race treated as the
main subject of social and historical action.

5. The Bio-Organic School
There have been many varieties of organic conceptions in the

history of social thought. In the nineteenth century alone one
can note the following: philosophical organicism (Hegel, Schel-

ling, and the Romantics), which opposed the nominalism and
mechanicism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its
contract conceptions of society; social-psychological organicism,
which saw the integral character of society in social reason,
opinion, and expression of will as an independent reality; and
finally bio-organic theories.

Society had already been likened to an organism in the
depths of antiquity.2° But a very strong orientation to the
evolutionary biology of Comte and Spencer was characteristic
of the bio-organic school. Historians of sociology usually
combine this school with those for which the concepts ‘society’
and ‘organism’ are synonymous, and which start from the point
that society, like an organism, is not a simple sum of separate
individuals (cells), but is a supra-individual whole. Society
acquired new qualities, as a whole, and in that sense is greater
than the sum of its parts. There is thus a primacy of the whole
over the part. The functions of the parts can only be understood
through the functions of the whole to which they belong.

In the scheme of this school’s theorists, comparative correla-
tions of social systems and biological organisms should help
bring out the structure (anatomy) and functions (physiology) of
the social organism, and of its organs (institutions) and elements
(ordinarily individuals or families) both in relation to the whole
and in relation to one another. That methodology was based on
a notion of the unity of the laws of evolution, which passed at
a certain stage from the individual to the creation of ‘super-
organisms’, ie., of communities of animals and people.?!
Social evolution was thought of as the same irreversible, linear,
and internally conditioned process as the growth of an organism
(although there were often more cautious formulations in the
school’s theories allowing for the specific nature of historical
movement).

Extreme organicists likened the development of society to
that of a biological organism in accordance with the ‘funda-
mental biogenetic law’ of Miiller and Haeckel (that ontogenesis
repeated phylogenesis) in its simplified interpretation. In their
view the stages of the universal history of civilisation (social
phylogenesis) were ontogenetically reproduced in the individual
histories of young nations, states, and colonies that were in new
conditions.3?

By combining Spencer’s idea of differentiation and the
bio-genetic law, sociologists of the bio-organic school endeav-
oured to predict the future stages of social development
and to reconstruct past ones. The most highly differentiated
and complex social phenomena and functions were usually
considered to be the latest in time of origin, while also being
those most sensitive to social upheavals, vulnerable, and change-
able.

The Russian dignitary (of German origin) Paul Lilienfeld
(1829-1903), who published mainly in German, employed the
organic methodology in extreme form in sociology. According
to him, human society, like other natural organisms, was a real
entity. Society differed from an organism in being less integrat-
ed. But the great mobility of the elements (individuals) in the
social organism meant only that it belonged to a higher class of
organisms. Society, being a system of the interactions of people,
performed the same functions as organisms of reproduction,
growth, differentiation, sickness, death, regeneration, integra-
tion of parts, etc. Sociology was based on biology and should
apply its laws.

The German economist and sociologist Albert Schaffle
(1831-1903) was a leading exponent of the organic school.
While sharing with the whole school a conviction of the superi-
ority of the wholist approach to social phenomena, he differed
from it by adhering to the traditions of German idealism.

He declared mental relations between people, and ideal and
technical modes and forms of intercourse, the subject-matter
of sociology. That will be seen in his definition of society,
which (according to him) was an indivisible community of
organic individuals that arose on the soil of purely mental acts
whose outward manifestations were symbols expressing ideas
and technical actions that created utilities and embodied the
products of human thought in external objects. The social com-
munity of individuals differed from the organic, biological links
of cells. The essence of the social was not the physico-chemical
and biological ties of individuals but their ideal connections
(i.e., psychic ties), expressed in their symbolical and technical
actions (in ‘practical art’).

Sociopsychic links were not purely ideal for Schaffle. The
sharing of mental activity among separate individuals in society,

76

given preservation of its integrity, evoked a need to create
symbols, means of communication, and special auxiliary institu-
tions to maintain them. Only then did mental, spiritual interac-
tion serve as a co-ordinator of the ‘social body’ and as a means
of preserving its wholeness and the coherence of the func-
tionally separate parts.>4

The development of material symbols capable of existing
relatively independently made their accumulation, transmission,
universality, and long life (tradition) possible. Social memory
arose, which could measure the advance of society. The ex-
istence of a collective consciousness in the succession of genera-
tions was another feature of the socium not inherent in organic
communities.

Schaffle divided the whole study of social forms and func-
tions into social anatomy, social morphology, and social physi-
ology, concerned with ‘social organs and tissues’, i.e., with or-
ganisations, institutes, and other mass associations of popula-
tion, and their connections, and social psychology, whose object
of study was the mental life of society.

Properly speaking, Schdaffle’s organico-biological analogies
had less significance and interest than his socio-psychological
notions. His doctrine of five general types of ‘social tissue’,
some of which were homologues of the tissues of an organism,
evoked most criticism. The fifth type, for example, i.e., psycho-
physical tissue, had the character of institutions operating in
the mental sphere and exercising public or private control. Its
organic homologue was nerve tissue. He treated the other types
of ‘social tissue’ in a similar way.

But these ‘social tissues’ were formed by an ‘ideal’ uniting
of active elements (people and their accumulated practical ex-
perience) and passive ones (material wealth). The general organi-
sation of the ‘social body’ was an increasingly complicated
structure of these main elements. The ‘social body’ performed
its ‘physiological’ life activity (functions) only through its active
components (individuals and groups of the population), and
only for them.

Schaffle himself, like other organicists, incidentally, con-
stantly made the reservation that he was employing organic
analogies solely for a more evocative and striking unfolding of
the sociological concepts, that the ‘social body’ was not an

oie |

organism in the biological sense, that even the biophysiological
element of the social link in marital unions acquired an ever
more mental, spiritual character, etc. Under the influence of
criticism, he employed organic-biological comparisons much
more moderately in the third, two-volume edition of his main
work Bau und Leben des socialen Kérpers (1896),?*° than in
the first four-volume edition (1875-78); and later he almost
refrained from these comparisons, while retaining the principle
of the integral approach.

Almost all organicists went through a similar evolution, in
particular Réné Worms (1869-1926), the editor of The Interna-
tional Sociological Review. In his Organisme et société,?® he
came forward as a typical member of the vulgar wing of the
school. Like Lilienfeld, he widely employed such terms as
‘social pathology’ and ‘diseases of society’ (to signify social
unrest and disturbances), ‘social hygiene’, and ‘improvement’
(for social reforms), ‘proliferation of society’ (for colonial ex-
pansion), etc.

In his last works he criticised his own earlier views and
concluded that organic theories were only suitable for simple
societies, since new factors came into action later that were
better described by contract theories. ‘Spiritual contact’ be-
tween people became the principal social factor for him in
that period.2”7 He thus passed from asserting the biological
unity of society to a psychological, social understanding of its
wholeness.

The bio-organic school gave struggle for existence a more
modest place in the development of society than social Darwin-
ism did, although both schools saw society as part of nature in
its highest expression, in which this law of nature should be
manifested. For Worms, for example, struggle for existence
(which took the form of competition in society) was derived
from the law of biological adaptation. The laws of nature and
society, in spite of their unity, were manifested differently in
nature and society. Natural selection and the struggle for exist-
ence were less violent among people. Worms considered that
the main, necessary thing was not conflict and clashes but
labour and creative activity, not struggle but living effort.

The many works of the sociologist and publicist Jacques
Novicow (1849-1912), who lived in France, were devoted to

struggle against social Darwinism and to preaching ideas of
the organic solidarity of people and pacifism. For him progress
was a special manifestation of the general law of equilibrium;
from the political point of view it was the achievement of
full unity of views and agreement among people, i.e., mental
equilibrium.

The French eclectic philosopher and sociologist Alfred
Fouillée (1838-1912) and the biologist and sociologist Alfred
Espinas (1844-1922) are usually included in the bio-organic
school.

Fouillée tried to combine positivism with idealism, and
the principles of determinism with free will and personalism.
He held it to be impossible to reduce the psychological to the
collective and the moral to the social. For him society was a
psychic, ‘contractual’ organism that existed only through in-
dividuals, and was governed by collective heredity, social de-
terminism, and free contract 28

Espinas can be considered one of the early predecessors
of zoopsychology and ethology. In his opinion zoology, by
studying the associations between individuals of the animal
kingdom, had promoted the birth of social science. The analo-
gies between these associations and societies were much closer
than between associations of cells and society.3°

The general methodology of the organic school contained
both true principles that have penetrated the history of sociolog-
ical science and false ones that have long been rejected by it.

The attempt to conceptualise the structures and functional
links of the social whole was valuable. The problem of combin-
ing the ‘organismic’ picture of the social whole and evolution-
ary, genetic views was lasting in its modified form that passed
into structural functionalism and other systems-oriented trends
in sociology. Although evolutionism was one of the main
sources feeding the school, its synthesis of synchronic organis-
mic views was unsuccessful. As a result the organicists were not
able to give a satisfactory explanation of social changes.

At the beginning of the school’s activity the host of possible
types of social and cultural entities was reduced to one model,
namely the wholeness of the biological organism. But it did
not follow from the fact that society was not a simple sum
of individuals and formed a certain unity that its wholeness was

F9

identical with or like the wholeness of a biological organism,
and its socio-cultural dependencies similar to the biological.
The applicability of some of the general formulas to different
objects still did not signify their identity in other respects.

The mistaken trend toward ontologising the unity of society,
peculiar to the organic school, or toward treating this unity as
a standard, had a reactionary political sense; any revolutionary
movement seemed a breach of the organic unity of society, an
abnormality and pathology. By replacing the openly metaphys-
ical form of the conception of ‘the social organism’ (for ex-
ample, the Hegelian, romantic form) by a pseudopositive one,
and putting laws of nature and of the biological organism in
the place of the Providence and the ‘objective spirit’, the bio-
organic school was also unable to reflect the significance of the
personality and the individual will in its theories.

While posing important problems of similar, elementary
features in the evolution and organisation of communities
of animals and people, the school underestimated the specific
qualitative features of human society.

Marxist sociology employs the concept of social organism
in order to stress the wholeness of society as systems and rela-
tions of social processes, while never replacing social laws by
biological ones.

6. The Social Darwinist School

The influence of Darwinism was felt one way or another in
the conceptions of the most varied spokesmen of sociological
thought, in particular of Gabriel Tarde, Lester Ward, Franklin
Giddings, and Emile Durkheim. For them, and a number of
other sociologists, Darwinism played the role either of a stim-
ulus of hypotheses or of an auxiliary methodological instru-
ment. But certain non-Marxian scholars made the theory of
biological evolution the direct basis of their sociological the-
ories, treating natural selection and the struggle for existence as
the main factors of social life. Darwinism was thus converted
from a theory of natural science into social Darwinism.

One must emphasise that Darwin himself, and other founders
of Darwinism like Alfred Wallace and Thomas Huxley, were

80

opponents of the direct transfer of biological concepts to the
field of the social sciences. Darwin, therefore, cannot be con-
sidered the founder of the trend that subsequently came to be
called social Darwinism. The person who first systematically
introduced the principles of evolutionary theory into the field
of the social sciences was Spencer, who treated natural selec-
tion, the struggle for existence, and survival of the fittest not
only as biological phenomena but also as sociological ones. It
was he who was really the creator of the social-Darwinist
school. Social Darwinism was not just a sociological trend
but also became widespread in other social sciences, publicistic
literature, fiction, and belles lettres.

The idea that there was a single social Darwinist ‘school’
with common theoretical principles is an oversimplification.
Among spokesmen of social Darwinism one meets vulgar ma-
terialists and idealists, social ‘realists’ who treat the social whole
as independent of the individuals comprising it, and ‘nominal-
ists’ who accept only individuals as real, racists and antiracial-
ists, liberal reformists, and proponents of spontaneity in social
development.

The extent to which social Darwinists likened social proc-
esses to biological ones was different. Some built their con-
ceptions directly on the principles of natural selection, struggle
for existence, and survival of the fittest. Others argued about
the specific nature of the manifestation of these principles in
the realm of social life, but remained within the context of this
conceptual scheme. The Italian sociologist Michele Angelo
Vaccaro (1854-1937), for instance, tried to show, in his The
Struggle for Existence and Its Effect on Humanity (1885),
what was the difference between the struggle for existence
among animals on the one hand, and among people on the
other.*° But the sociologists who can be called social Darwin-
ists in the narrow sense had no substantial influence on the
subsequent development of sociological thought.

Spokesmen of the other version of social Darwinism did
not reduce social processes directly to biological ones; some of
them were even opposed to biological analogies. Their concep-
tions were close to the psychological trend; the terms of evolu-
tionary theory were less often met with them. Nevertheless they
also had an orientation to a certain way of interpreting evolu-

81
6~1147

tionary theory, which was displayed primarily in their giving
social conflicts the principal place in their conceptions. Treat-
ment of social life as an arena of ruthless struggle between in-
dividuals and groups was the most common attribute uniting
all social Darwinism. The increase in attention to the problem of
conflict at the end of the nineteenth century was by no means
accidental, since class antagonisms and conflicts between capi-
talist states had become unusually sharp in that century.

While the conception of conflict followed directly from
the theory of biological evolution in the first variety of social
Darwinism, it was indirect in the second, or even followed in
general from other sources. The sociologists whose conceptions
I shall now examine in detail belonged to this second variety of
social Darwinism.

Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), the English publicist, econo-
mist, and political scientist was one of the first to try to apply
the principles of Darwin’s theory in social science, in his Physics
and Politics (1872). He stressed the immense role of natural
selection mainly in the initial period of human history.

Whatever may be said against the principle of ‘natural selection’

in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in

early human history: the strongest killed out the weakest as they
41

could,

According to him, the struggle in the world of people was
mainly waged between groups, rather than individuals. He
considered the striving of some nations to dominate others,
and within nations the drive of some social groups to dominate
the other groups, to be the main social laws.*?

While stressing the very important role of intergroup con-
flicts, Bagehot paid great attention at the same time to intra-
group solidarity, a factor of which was imitation. He thus came
forward as a forerunner of Tarde, who made ‘imitation’ the
central concept of his conception. Bagehot considered that
imitation had its most significant place in the life of ‘primitive’
societies, that it was linked with the undifferentiated nature of
the various spheres of social life, with detailed regulation of
individual behaviour, and the cruelty and brutality of the sanc-
tions against deviations from established patterns.

82

Along with tendencies to imitation, Bagehot noted the
existence of an opposite tendency, viz., people’s striving to
differ from their predecessors, which provided the possibility
of progress. He considered the optimum conditions for progress
to arise in societies in which there was a proper relation of the
two trends, viz., the tendency to variation, which opened the
way to innovations, and that to imitation, which ensured social
solidarity.

In contrast to Bagehot, the Austrian sociologist and lawyer
Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838-1909) did not deduce his concep-
tions directly from evolutionary theory. He was an opponent
of biological analogies and criticised those sociologists (Comte,
Spencer, Lilienfeld) who employed them as an explanatory
principle; for him biological analogies had no significance for
sociology but provided only comparisons and images, and in
no case ever yielded knowledge. Gumplowicz’s conceptions
have often been characterised by historians of sociology as
social Darwinism, mainly because of his approach to society
as an aggregate of groups struggling ruthlessly among themselves
for domination.

The naturalistic conception of history that Gumplowicz
shared considered humanity a particle of the universe and
nature, a particle governed by the same eternal laws as the
whole. The alpha and omega of sociology, its highest truth,
and its last word, he suggested, was human history as a natural
process.

A fatalistic interpretation of social laws and a fetishising
of historical necessity were inherent in Gumplowicz’s concep-
tions. The individual and his freedom figured as a pseudoreality
in his interpretation, or as a reality of the second order. Society,
on the contrary, was real, and the supreme reality that de-
termined the behaviour of the individual. In this case we meet
one of the most extremist versions of ‘social realism’, i.e.,
the view of society as a reality not only irreducible to its com-
ponent individuals but existing apart from and above them.

For Gumplowicz sociology was the philosophical basis of
all the social sciences, whose job it was to realise the link
between them. Unlike the philosophy of history, whose ‘task
was to explain where mankind had come from, and was going,
sociology was concerned with investigating social groups and the

83
6*

relations between them. He considered continuous and ruthless
struggle between different social groups the main factor in so-
cial life. He declared the main social law to be the drive of each
social group to subordinate to itself every other group it en-
countered in its path, i.e., the drive to enslave and dominate.

According to Gumplowicz the initial, original groups operat-
ing in history were hordes united by anthropological and ethnic
attributes. In his treatment of the relations between hordes he
was a forerunner of Sumner. He introduced the concept ‘ethno-
centrism’, subsequently employed by Sumner, and defined it as
the reasons by virtue of which each people believed it had
always occupied the highest point not only among contempora-
neous peoples and nations but also in relation to all peoples
of the historical past.4* Gumplowicz found a state of con-
tinuous hostility between hordes. While the result of clashes
between them was at first the physical annihilation of the de-
feated, later, in the course of social evolution, the defeated were
enslaved by the victors. As a result the state arose. But inter-
group conflicts did not disappear. The fundamentally inerad-
icable struggle between groups continued in a new form; what
had been a struggle between anthropologically different hordes
at the most primitive level was turned, at the highest stages of
development, into a struggle of social groups, classes, estates,
and political parties.

The most common division of social groups in Gumplowicz’s
conceptions, and the main one was that into rulers and ruled.
Both had a drive for power; in the ruling classes this was ex-
pressed in exploitation, as intense as possible, and consequently
in enslavement of the subordinate classes; in the latter this drive
was manifested in an increase in the strength of resistance, in a
lessening and weakening of dependence.

Why did the relations between groups continually acquire
the character of an antagonistic conflict? In reply to that
Gumplowicz introduced a solid dose of vulgar economic mate-
tialism and naturalism. He explained the ultimate cause of all
social processes, including the conflicts that constituted the
essence of them, as man’s striving to satisfy his material needs.
In that connection he claimed that economic motives were
always and everywhere the cause of any social movement, and
governed all state and social development. Needs, according to

84

him, could not be satisfied in any other way than through some
groups’ compulsion and violence against others.

Gumplowicz often employed the term ‘race’ (in particular
in the initial period of his work), and even used it in the titles
of his principal works Rasse und Staat (Race and State) (1875)
and Der Rassenkampf (Race Struggle) (1883). He understood
race as a social and cultural, rather than a biological phenom-
enon. He treated ‘race struggle’ as the struggle of heteroge-
neous social entities, groups, and communities.44 He stressed
in every way the immeasurably small role of biological heredity
and the decisive role of the social environment in the determina-
tion of human behaviour, noting that pure races did not exist
at the present time, while the mixing of races had a positive
significance.

Did that mean that he did not, in general, recognise the
significance of racial differences (in the physical, anthropologi-
cal sense) in social evolution? One must answer that in the nega-
tive. He considered these differences determinant in the early
stages of social development. The racial factor figured then as
a factor of socio-psychological alienation, which was prompted
by other causes in the course of subsequent social evolution.

Gumplowicz’s conceptions were extremely contradictory.
He claimed, for instance, that the problems of the initial stage
of society’s development did not come within the competence
of sociology and other social sciences. At the same time he
constantly appealed to the initial, original moments of this
development, following on the whole Spencerian evolutionism,
which treated complex social formations as aggregates of
simple ones.

Gumplowicz showed that the object of sociology (in distinc-
tion to the philosophy of history) was not humanity but social
groups; at the same time he perceived that humanity could be
called the proper subject-matter and scientific object of so-
ciology.

The main contradiction in his theory was that, on the one
hand, it proclaimed the specific nature of social phenomena and
their irreducibility to the individual and to species man, and
on the other hand the ultimate basis of social phenomena was
always and everywhere invariant human nature and its incessant
striving to satisfy wants, the drive to domination, etc. His claim

85

that there was a special class of social phenomena that differed
from the other phenomena of reality remained purely declara-
tive; the naturalisation of social processes led him to the same
biopsychic reductionism that he himself opposed.

Gumplowicz’s conceptions were mistaken because they were
based on an underestimation of the internal factors of the
functioning and development of social groups, so that he saw
the reason for the rise of the state in the subordination of some
ethnic groups to others, ignoring the role of intraclan and
intratribal differentiation in this process.

While treating conflicts and violence as basic factors of
social life, Gumplowicz paid no attention to the significance of
solidarity and co-operation.

His conceptions were consonant with those of another
Austrian sociologist, Gustav Ratzenhofer (1842-1904), author
of the books Wesen und Zweck der Politik (1893), Die soziolo-
gische Erkenntnis (1898), and the posthumously published
Soziologie (1908). He considered the main phenomena and
processes of social life to be the following: the self-preserva-
tion and multiplication of individuals; change of individual
and social types; struggle for existence; the absolute hostility
of races; spatial distribution; racial differentiation; dominance
and subordination; alternation of the individualisation and so-
cialisation of structures; change of interests; the state; and
global society.*® Like Gumplowicz he considered himself a
proponent of monism, claiming that the same regularities
operated in society as in nature; in that connection he denied
the opposing of the sciences of nature to the sciences of the
mind. Sociological regularities, according to him, were close to
chemical, and especially, biological ones. Sociology was a
philosophical science whose purpose was to provide the basis
of all social sciences and politics.

While regarding conflict as the main social process, Ratzen-
hofer made the category of interest the keystone. Interest was
the main principle governing social processes, and contained
the key to understanding them. Social life was presented in his
interpretation as a play of various interests. He distinguished
five main types of interest: procreative (stimulating continua-
tion of the species), physiological (connected with nutrition),
individual (connected with the drive to self-assertion), social

86

(kinship and group), and transcendental (religious). Interests
were nothing else than consciousness of inborn biological needs
and impulses, which governed the struggle for existence. Social
groups arose as an organisation of individuals for the purposes
of this struggle. Unlike Gumplowicz, he interpreted social
processes in the final count as interindividual, and the group
as the product of interactions between individuals.

Ratzenhofer’s conceptions influenced the American sociolo-
gist Albion Small (1854-1926). Small, following him, treated
interest as the main entity of sociological investigation; from his
point of view, the notion of interests had to serve ‘the same
purpose in sociology which the notion of atoms has served in
physical science’.*® ‘The whole life-process,’ he wrote, ‘is at
last the process of developing, adjusting, and satisfying in-
terests.’*7

Small defined interest quite vaguely as follows: an interest is an
unsatisfied capacity, corresponding to an unrealized condition, and
it is predisposition to such rearrangement as would tend to realize
the indicated condition.7°

The most general classes of interests were the following:
‘health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and right-
ness’.*° Interest had two aspects: subjective (desire) and objec-
tive, i.e., that in which a need, ‘the desired thing’ made itself
felt. Social phenomena as a whole, according to him, were the
result of the interaction of three chief factors: ‘1. nature; 2. in-
dividual; 3. institutions, or modes of association between in-
dividuals’ .5°

Of ali the social Darwinist theories in sociology, Small’s
contains its specific features least and is most penetrated by psy-
chologism, which was due to Ward’s influence. Although Small
considered biological analogies a necessary stage in the history
of social science, he linked sociology’s further progress with
a transition from biological analogies to direct analysis of real
social processes. !

For him, conflict was not a universal factor of social life.
He treated it as a form of people’s relationships, dominant
mainly in the early stages of historical development.

His constructions lacked conceptual rigour: while analysing

87

a vast number of concepts (association, social process, physical
environment, spiritual environment, subjective environment,
social functions, social aims, social forces, values, appraisals),
he did not try to tie them up into a single system.

An indication of the need for a complex approach to social
facts was of essential importance in the methodological part of
Small’s theory, but he did not develop that idea clearly and
consistently enough.>? He distinguished four phases in research:
the descriptive, analytical, evaluative, and constructive. The
last phase clarified his view of the purpose of sociology. In his
view it should not refrain from value judgments; on the con-
trary, that was its direct task. Sociology, according to him,
should have practical application in ‘social technology’, i-.,
in ‘adapting means to ends in practical improvement of so-
ciety’.5* Hence his political reformism aimed at criticising the
most obvious faults of capitalist society from liberal positions.

Small’s conceptions did not have any substantial influence
on the development of American sociology, but he played a
great part in institutionalising it.

One of the most eminent figures in American sociology was
Prof. William Graham Sumner of Yale University (1840-1910),
He took the basic principles of his sociology from Spencer.
These consisted in assertion (1) of the automatic, undeviating
character of social evolution, and (2) of the omnipotence and
universality of natural selection and the struggle for existence,
and defined Sumner’s stance on various economic, political,
and moral issues, sometimes even very partial ones.

Starting from a notion of the steady, automatic character
of social evolution, he rejected any attempts to reform, let alone
revolutionise social relations. The title of one of his essays,
‘The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over’ (1894) was ex-
tremely characteristic in that respect 54

Sumner opposed all forms of state control of social life.
While a most zealous proponent of the principle of laissez-faire,
he defended not so much maintenance of the status quo as the
need for spontaneity in development; that was the specific
character of his conservatism. One could formulate his credo
as ‘evolution knows what to do’.

Evolution, according to Sumner, hewed out its way through
the struggle for existence, which was as ‘natural’ as evolution

88

itself. Competition can no more be done away with than gravita-
tion, he asserted. In that connection he regarded social inequal-
ity as a natural state and necessary condition of the develop-
ment of civilisation. The idea of natural selection figured in
his interpretation as the idea of the naturalness of social selec-
tion. As Hofstadter has remarked, we find in Sumner a new
version of the Calvinist idea of predestination.>> The difference
lay only in Sumner’s putting providentially understood ‘evolu-
tion’ in place of providence, ensuring with iron necessity
triumph of the strongest and defeat of the weakest. He con-
sidered the accumulation of social wealth in the hands of the
few a condition of social progress and not an obstacle to it.

One must stress that the specific features of social Darwin-
ism were mainly manifested in Sumner’s publicistic utterances.
As for his sociological works, its weight in them was much less.
His chief work Folkways (1906) analysed much ethnographic
material. He considered customs to be ultimately the product
of people’s fundamental biological needs, in striving to satisfy
which they developed certain modes of activity that became a
routine and functioned as customs (at the level of the group)
and habits (at the level of the individual). He treated folkways
or folk customs unusually broadly, including all standardised
forms of behaviour in them. He examined two groups of factors
as the direct causes of customs. The first was interest .°° People
struggled either with one another or with the surrounding fauna
and flora. Customs were thus certain types of defence and
attack during the struggle for existence. Secondly, folkways
were the product of four motives, which Sumner considered
the ‘four great motives of human action’ in general (thus antici-
pating William Thomas’s ‘four wishes’). They were ‘hunger, sex
passion, vanity, and fear... Under each of these motives there
are interests’.>7 Folkways, he stressed, ‘are not creations of
human purpose and wit. They are like products of natural forces
which men unconsciously set in operation’ .>*

Sumner’s concepts of ‘we-group’ or ‘in-group’ and ‘they-
group’ or ‘out-group’ acquired very great popularity. Relations
within a ‘we-group’ were ones of solidarity, while hostility
prevailed between groups. Hostility was associated with ethno-
centrism, which he defined as the ‘view of things in which
one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others

89

are scaled and rated with reference to it’.5?

On the whole Sumner created a simplified picture of rela-
tions between groups in ‘primitive’ societies. In fact, co-opera-
tion and mutual help are found in the relations between clans
and tribes as well as hostility. The biological reductionism of
Sumner’s conception of custom did not stand up to criticism;
if folkways were solely the result of people’s biological needs,
it would be impossible to explain the existence and long func-
tioning of customs that were harmful as regards biological
needs.

Sumner’s conception also had undoubted merits. He was
one of the first to pose the problem of the normative aspects
of social life. If one rejects the initial premisses of his concep-
tion of folkways (struggle for existence, etc.), one can find a
number of important considerations in it about the character-
istic features of customs. The concepts of ethnocentrism, ‘we-
groups’, and ‘they-groups’ had considerable significance for
social psychology and ethnography. But the positive aspects
of his conceptions were depreciated by its social Darwinist
foundations and the chaotic piling up of ethnographic material
not united by any methodological principles. Furthermore, the
problem of method itself did not exist for him. When we
evaluate his place in the history of sociology as a whole, we
must note that when rational propositions are found in his
conception they are not only not associated with the under-
lying principles of his social Darwinism but on the contrary are
very distant from them.

Thus, however the conceptions of social Darwinists differ,
reductionism is inherent in all of them, i.e., reduction of the
laws and patterns of one level of reality to another one. The
notion of groups constantly warring with one another, as a
new version of Hobbes’ conception of ‘war of everyone against
everyone’, was as bankrupt as the opposite notion of people
living in harmony and concord.

Social Darwinists drew attention to social conflicts but
ignored the leading role of class struggle. Not seeing the connec-
tions of conflicts with certain social relations, and ascribing a
status of ‘naturalness’, eternity, and insuperability, to them,
social Darwinists came to a one-sided, and biased evaluation
of social conflicts.

90

a

In spite of the seriousness of some of the problems posed,
the naturalistic and biological-evolutionary conceptions in
nineteenth-century sociology were largely unscientific and un-
historical. In his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin
showed the impermissibility of substituting ‘eternal’ laws of
nature for historical laws and regularities. Many non-Marxian
sociologists sharply criticised these conceptions in the first
half of the twentieth century, though from other standpoints.
The biologising of social phenomena began to be a clear anach-
ronism, and naturalistic schools a blind alley in the history of
sociological thought.°° But the disputes have been revived once
more in connection with the latest advances of genetics, ecol-
ogy, and ethology.

Much has also been written in the West about ‘sociobiology’
as the ‘new synthesis’ of the biological and social sciences—from
molecular and population genetics to the psychology of behav-
iour and ergonomics.°! This ‘new synthesis’ is counterposed
to the old one and to the attempts to integrate social and bio-
logical knowledge in the old biological, evolutionary schools.
But there is a certain continuity of the problems and modes of
posing them. The idea of the ‘superorganism’ has been resur-
rected and made the object of research. Serious attention is
being paid to the system of communications in the collective
behaviour of animals and to the similar mechanisms of beha-
viour in people’s social life. This research is necessary in itself,
and fruitful. But in that connection there has also been a revival
of old naturalistic conceptions, for example, in attempts to
make the historical evolution of human society, and the forms
of its social organisation, dependent on its gene fund, which
is said to determine social behaviour.°? Dubious attempts are
also being made to transfer observations of the behaviour of
animals mechanically onto man, although these attempts are
based on more cautious scientific descriptions and theoretical
constructs than before.

In that connection the philosophical, ideological foundations
of the biological, naturalistic, and socio-historical interpretation
of the problem of man, and possible points of rapprochement
and disagreement between the programmes of social research

91

stemming from these interpretations, are being discussed again
in the contemporary critique of social biology.°*

The topicality, and theoretical and practical significance of
this problem have arisen in connection with the fact that the
latest advances of biology, in particular of genetics, are creating
conditions for investigating diverse concrete forms of the in-
teraction of the biological and the social in the development and
life of man and society. Under the present second industrial
revolution the very complex task of the optimum combination
of society’s scientific and technological, and production activ-
ity, with processes taking place in the biosphere is again being
posed.

Notes

' Wilhelm Ostwald. Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft
(Klinkhardt, Leipzig, 1909).

? Cited from: Lucien Febvre. La terre et l’évolution humaine. In-
troduction géographique a l'histoire (La Renaissance du livre, Paris,
1922), p 12.

3 Henry T. Buckle. History of Civilisation in England (Appleton,
New York, 1862).

* Karl Ritter. Die Erdkunde im Verhaltniss zur Natur und zur Ge-
schichte des Menschen oder allgemeine, vergleichende Geographie.
21 Vols. (G. Reimer, Berlin, 1822-1859).

5 Friedrich Ratzel. Die Erde und das Lieben, Vol. 1 (Bibliographi-
sches Institut, Leipzig, 1901); Anmthropogeographie. 2 Vols, (J. Engel-
horn, Stuttgart, 1891-1899); Politische Geographie, 3rd ed. (Munich,
1923).

6 Karl Haushofer. Erdkunde, Geopolitik und Wehrwissenschaft
(Hueber, Munich, 1934).

7 See Giinter Heyden. Kritik der deutschen Geopolitik (Dietz Verlag,
Berlin, 1958).

® Rudolf Kjellén. Der Staat als Lebensform (Vowinckel, Berlin,
1924).

° Ellen C. Semple. Influences of Geographic Environment on the
Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography (Constable & Co.,
London, 1937).

*° Ellsworth Huntington. Civilization and Climate (Yale U.P., New

92

Haven, Conn., 1924); The Character of Races as Influenced by Physical
Environment, Natural Selection and Historical Development (Scribner’s
Sons, New York, 1925); Mainsprings of Civilization, (Chapman & Hall,
London, 1945).

11 Camille Vallaux. Géographie sociale: le sol et l'état (Octave Doin
et Fils., Paris, 1911).

12 Paul Mougeolle. Statique des civilizations (Leroux, Paris, 1883).

13 A.L. Chizhevsky. Fizicheskie faktory istoricheskogo protsessa
(Physical Factors of History), (Kaluga, 1924).

14 John A. Stewart, William Warntz. Macrogeography and Social
Science. In: The Geographical Review, 1958, 48, 2: 167-184.

'5 Environment and Cultural Behaviour. Ecological Studies. In:
Andrew P. Vayda (Ed.). Cultural Anthropology (The Natural History
Press, Garden City, N.Y., 1969).

'6 Paul Vidal de la Blache, Principes de géographie humaine (Librarie
Armand Colin, Paris, 1922).

17 Elisée Reclus. L’homme et la terre, 6 vols. (Librairie universelle,
Paris, 1905-1908); L. I. Mechnikov. Tsivilizatsiya i velikie istoricheskie
reki (Civilisation and the Great Historical Rivers), (Moscow, 1927).

1® George Tatham. Environmentalism and Possibilism. In: Griffith
Taylor (Ed.). Geography in the Twentieth Century, A Study of Growth,
Fields, Techniques, Aims and Trends (Methuen, London, 1957), pp 128-
162.

12 David Harvey. Explanation in Geography (Arnold, London,
1969).

20° H. S. Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des 19 Jahrhunderts, 1899.

2t Houston S. Chamberlain. Avische Weltanschauung (Bruckmann,
Munich, 1912).

22 Hugo Meyer. Houston Stewart Chamberlain als vélkischer Denker
(Bruck mann, Munich, 1939).

23 Georges Vacher de Lapouge. Race et milieu social (Librairie des
sciences politiques et sociales, Paris, 1909), pp VIII, 172.

24 Ibid., p VIAL.

25 Georges Vacher de Lapouge. Les sélections sociales (A. Fontemo-
ing, Paris, 1896).

26 G. Vacher de Lapouge. Race et milieu social, p. 233.

*7 Ibid., pp 206-211.

28 Otto Ammon. Die Gesellschaftsordnung und Ihre Natirlichen
Grundlagen (Fischer, Jena, 1896).

2° G. Vacher de Lapouge. Race et milieu social, p 212.

93

3° Tadeusz Szczurkiewicz. Studia Socjologiczne (Panstw. Wyd-wo
nauk, Warsaw, 1970).

31 Judith E. Schlanger. Les métaphores de l'organisme (Librairie
Vrin, Paris, 1971).

32 Réné Worms. Organisme et société (Giatd et Briére, Paris, 1896).

33 Guillaume de Greef. Le transformisme social. Essai sur le progrés
et le regrés des sociétés (Felix Alcan, Paris, 1895).

34 Albert Schaffle. Die geistanstaltlichen Grundverkniipfungen., In:
Werner Sombart (Ed.). Soziologie (Pan-Verlag Rolf Heise, Berlin, 1923),
pp 60-75.

35 Albert Schaffle. Bau und Leben des sozialen Korpers. 4 Vols.
(Laupp, Tiibingen, 1881).

36 Réné Worms. Organism et société (Paris, 1895).

37 Réné Worms. La sociologie. Sa nature, son contenu, ses attaches
(Marcel Giard, Paris, 1926).

38 Alfred Fouillée. La science sociale contemporaine (Hachette et
ci€., Paris, 1880). :

3° Alfred Espinas. Des sociétés animales. Etudes de psychologie
comparée (Bailliére, Paris, 1877).

*° Michele Angelo Vaccaro. La lotta per l'esistenza e i suoi effetti
nell’ umanita (Tib. Tiberina di F. Setth, Rome, 1886).

*! Walter Bagehot. Physics and Politics. In: The Works of Walter
Bagehot, Vol. 4 (The Travellers Insurance Co., Hartford, Conn., 1891),
p 442.

42 Ibid., p 457.

*3 Louis Gumplowicz. La lutte des races. Recherches sociologiques
(Guillaumin et C'®., Paris, 1893), p 349.

** Ibid., p 193.

*5 Gustav Ratzenhofer. Die soziologische Erkenntnis. Positive Philo-
sophie des socialen Lebens (Brockhaus, Leipzig, 1898), pp 244-250.

“6 Albion W. Small. General Sociology. An Exposition of the Main
Development in Sociological Theory from Spencer to Ratzenhofer
(The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1905), p 426.

47 Ibid., pp 433-434.

*® Ibid ., p 433.

*° Ibid., pp 434-435.

5° Ibid., p 552.

51 Albion W. Small. The Meaning of Social Science (The University
of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1910), pp 79-80.

94

52 Albion W. Small. General Sociology, p 15; idem. The Meaning of
Social Science, p 160.

53 Albion W. Small. General Sociology , p 34.

54 See W.S. Sumner, War and Other Essays (Yale U.P., New Haven,
Conn., 1911).

55 Richard Hofstadter. Social Darwinism in American Thought
(The Beacon Press, Boston, Mass., 1955), p 66.

56 W.G. Sumner. Folkways. A Study of the Sociological Importance
of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Dover Publications,
New York, 1959), p 3.

57 [bid., p 18.

58 Ibid., p 4.

5° Ibid., p 13.

6© Nicholas S. Timasheff. Sociological Theory. Its Nature and Growth
(Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1955).

61 Pierre L. Van den Berghe. Man in Society. A Biosocial View
(Elsevier, New York, 1975); Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology. The New
Synthesis (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1975).

62 C.D. Darlington. The Evolution of Man and Society (Simon and
Schuster, New York, 1969); Francois Jacob. La logique du vivant. Une
histoire de UVhérédité (Gallimard, Paris, 1971).

63 Walter Hollitscher. Aggression in Menschenbild. Marx, Freud,
Lorenz (Globus, Vienna, 1979).

5

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIOLOGY
OF THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

Igor Kon

1. Psychology and Sociology
in the Nineteenth Century

The crisis of biological, naturalistic theories at the end of the
nineteenth century promoted a strengthening of the psycholog-
ical trend in sociology. The idea of reducing the social to the
psychological was not, of course, new. Locke and Hume, the
French Enlightenment, and the English Utilitarians had cited
the ‘universal laws of psychology’ and the ‘properties of human
nature’. John Stuart Mill asserted, in polemics against Comte,
that all social laws were reducible to ‘laws of individual human
nature’.

Men are not, when brought together,converted into another kind of
substance, with different properties; ... Human beings in society
have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be
resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual man.’

Sociology, therefore, as the science ‘of the actions of collective
masses of mankind, and the various phenomena which constitute
social life’, had its own base in psychology.”

As we have seen, biology also served only as a methodolog-
ical model (organic analogy, the principle of evolution, etc.)
for many naturalistic conceptions, while their meaningful

96

premisses rested on ‘everyday’ psychology’. The birth of the
experimental psychology, and its institutionalisation as an
independent discipline separate from both philosophy and
physiology, raised its academic prestige and encouraged spread
of psychologism in other branches of knowledge. While psychol-
ogy had been considered a simple concretisation of philosophy
in the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920),
the founder of experimental psychology, endeavoured to alter
that attitude, claiming that all the philosophy of his day was
modern psychology.

At the end of the century psychologism, as a general! trend
toward psychological substantiation of scientific knowledge
and explanation of the most diverse phenomena, became wide-
spread. Psychological substantiation of epistemology, logic,
aesthetics, linguistics, history, literary studies, and other disci-
plines became the academic fashion. Psychologism was a charac-
teristic feature of the ‘second positivism’ (Machism, empirio-
criticism). Sociology, too, did not escape this epidemic.

The psychology of the early nineteenth century was exclu-
sively that of the individual and did not take social processes
into account.

The position changed in the last third of the century. On the
one hand, psychologists discovered that it was impossible to
reduce higher psychic functions to physiological processes,
and that these required complex social factors to be taken into
account. On the other hand, sociologists, who were not satisfied
with primitive biological, organic analogies, evinced a growing
interest in problems of motivation and the psychological mechan-
isms of social behaviour. The merging of these two opposite
movements formed, as a result, what we conventionally call
the psychological trend in sociology.

Like other trends in ideas of that period, psychological
sociology was by no means a single whole. The sole feature
that constituted it as a trend was a striving, not always con-
scious, to reduce the social to the psychological. But that was
expressed by various authors with unequal force, while the
type of psychology they appealed to was not the same. Certain
more or less independent ramifications can be seen, depending
on the problems advanced and the explanatory categories:
psychological evolutionism; instinctivism; ‘folk psychology’,

97
7-1147

closely linked with ethnography; group psychology; and inter-
actionism which made interpersonal relations the primary unit
of sociological research.

2. Psychological Evolutionism

Psychological explanation of social processes did not necessitate
an immediate break with the ideas of the biological, evolution-
ary school. Originally it was a matter only of ‘supplementing’
the evolutionary scheme by study of the psychological mechan-
isms of the development and functioning of society. These
mechanisms themselves, moreover, were treated in a very broad,
amorphous way. The spokesmen of psychological evolutionism,
the American sociologists Lester Ward (1841-1913) and Frank-
lin Giddings (1855-1931), following Spencer, regarded the
development of society as part of cosmic evolution, each succes-
sive stage of which accumulated the advances of the preceding
ones. But, whereas the proponents of the biological orientation
considered social evolution a direct continuation and part of
the organic, and stressed the features of automatism in it, the
psychoevolutionists saw in the more complex forms of social
life a result of the development of conscious element, putting
forward, in contrast to Spencer’s /aissez-faire, a slogan of pur-
posive evolution, or rational control of social processes.

Lester F. Ward was a geologist and palaeobotanist by profes-
sion, who turned to sociology in his mature years. His main
works were: Dynamic Sociology (1883), Psychic Factors of
Civilization (1893), Outlines of Sociology (1898), Pure Sociol-
ogy (1903), Applied Sociology (1906), and Textbook of Sociol-
ogy (1905) in collaboration with J.Q. Dealey. In 1906 he was
elected the first president of the American Sociological Soci-
ety. Ward’s ideas were not particularly original. He considered
that the Spencerian principle of cosmic evolution should be
supplemented as regards man by the value idea of progress.
Social institutions were the result of the development of psychic
forces rather than of vital ones. ‘The social forces are the
psychic forces as they operate in the collective state of man.’?
From that it followed that psychology should be the foundation
of sociology, and not biology as with Spencer. Sociogenesis

98

was the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder, a synthesis
of all natura! forces formed during cosmogenesis, biogenesis,
and anthropogenesis. The qualitative difference of this new,
social reality was the existence of emotion and aim, which did
not exist in the actions of blind natural forces. These new
factors gradually altered genetic natural processes that lacked
aim into telestic ones (from Gr. tele—end) or, what is the same
thing, into social processes with the form of man’s purposive
action.

Ward developed a view in his main work Dynamic Sociology
and several others that the primary social force was desires (in
particular hunger and thirst) connected with maintenance of the
individual’s life, and sexual desires which ensured continuation
of the species. More complex intellectual, moral, and aesthetic
desires were built up on the basis of these primary ones, by
which he tried to explain the progressive development of society
and its ‘improvement’ (the principle of ‘meliorism’).

Apart from individual end-posing Ward recognised the exist-
ence of ‘collective telesis’, the agent of which was the state.
Social consciousness could not yet, at that time, he suggested,
neutralise forces harmful for society, like private monopolies,
whose activity he equated with robbery. But competition and
monopoly inust yield in the future to conscious co-operation.
Ward’s petty-bourgeois democratic spirit, and his diatribes
against monopolies, repeatedly drew the anger of reactionaries
down onto him. In fact, however, he did not encroach on the
foundations of capitalism at all in defending the principle of
peaceful elimination of class inequality and of attainment of
universal harmony; his ideas were frankly eclectic.

Eclecticism also characterised the opinions of Giddings,
the founder in 1894 of the first chair of sociology (in Colum-
bia University). His chief books were The Principles of Sociol-
ogy (1896), the textbook The Elements of Sociology (1898),
Inductive Sociology (1901), Studies in the Theory of Human
Society (1922), and The Scientific Theory of Human Society
(1924).

According to him sociology is ‘a science that tries to con-
ceive of society in its unity, and attempts to explain it in terms
of cosmic cause and law’.* While arguing about the equilibrium
of energy and constancy of force quite in the spirit of Spencer,

99

Je

Giddings made it precise, however, that society was not simply
an organism but ‘an organization’ that arose partly as a con-
sequence of ‘unconscious evolution, partly as a result of con-
scious planning’.® It was ‘a psychical organism essentially’, ac-
cording to him, ‘but witha physical basis’.° Sociology, therefore,
‘must combine the subjective and the objective interpreta-
tions’.’ He himself concentrated on the subjective, psycho-
logical aspect.

‘The original and elementary subjective fact in society,’
Giddings held, was ‘the consciousness of kind’, i.e., a ‘state
of consciousness in which any being, whether low or high in
the scale of life, recognizes another conscious being as of like
kind with itself”.®

Consciousness of kind or, as Giddings sometimes called
this phenomenon, ‘the Social Mind’, meant the spiritual unity
of rational beings, which made their conscious relationship
with one another possible while preserving the individuality
of each. In essence it was a matter of group and collective
consciousness whose products were public opinion, cultural
traditions, collective moods, and social values. Giddings did
not, however, delimit the content of social consciousness and
the psychic processes and mechanisms by which the relation-
ships of individuals were realised.

In his later works, written after World War I, he partly
revised his original positions. In trying to combine them with
the then popular behaviourism, and stressing the significance
of quantitative methods in sociology, he asserted that sociology
was a ‘science statistical in method’.’ That allows the historian
to consider him one of the heralds of neopositivism in American
sociology.'® On the whole, however, his influence on American
sociology was due, rather, to his administrative possibilities.

3. Instinctivism

The psychological evolutionism of Ward and Giddings did not
leave much of a mark on the history of sociological thought.
Instinctivism proved to be much more influential. The problem
of ‘social instincts’ did not arise in the nineteenth century by
chance. By painting society in the image and likeness of the
individual, nineteenth-century psychology endeavoured to find

100

an inner personal psychic determinant or number of determi-
nants that could simultaneously explain both individual and
group behaviour.

The tradition of the Enlightenment had relied predominant-
ly ona ‘rational’ model of man, deducing his behaviour from a
rational reckoning and considerations of utility. The Romantics,
on the contrary, stressed the emotional, instinctive principle,
the influence of biological, irrational factors. The rationalism
of the Enlightenment, with its naive optimism, was seriously
compromised when the ‘realm of reason’ to which it appealed
turned out to be more like Hobbes’ ‘war of everyone against
everyone’. Irrationalism greatly increased in the philosophy
of the late nineteenth century, and a tendency to explain
human behaviour mainly by irrational, unconscious impulses,
be it Max Stirner’s ‘egoism’ or Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’.
Biology, by disclosing the mechanisms of animals’ instinctive
actions, seemed to provide this trend with a natural-science basis.
Experimental studies of the human psyche also revealed the
existence of powerful unconscious processes and structures in
it. T. A. Ribot laid the foundations of experimental study of
emotions. The psychologists of the Wurzburg School introduced
the concept of attitude, a state of consciousness, indeterminate
and not readily amenable to analysis, that controlled the choice
and dynamics of mental operations and impressions. Study of
hypnotic states and psychopathology also brought scholars up
against the problem of the unconscious.

Taken together all that encouraged a frequent interpreting
of social phenomena at the end of the nineteenth century in
terms of ‘instincts’, ‘drives’, and ‘impulses’. The concept ‘in-
stinct’ was used in that connection in a broad, general, everyday
sense, signifying both the biological needs of the organism and
inherited programmes of behaviour and, even, simply desires.
Group, ‘social’ instincts were also written about, as well as the
individual’s biological instincts. Giddings, for example, advised
treating his conception of consciousness of kind as a developed
form of the theory of instincts.

William McDougall (1871-1938), an English psychologist
who worked in the United States from 1921, and the author of
the very popular An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908),
is considered the foremost spokesman of instinctivism. In his

101

view the ‘psychology of instincts’ was the theoretical founda-
tion of all the social sciences. He understood by instinct an
innate or natural psychophysical predisposition that compelled
the individual to perceive or pay attention to certain objects and
thereby experience a specific emotional stimulation, and to act
in a certain way or, at least, to experience a stimulus to so act,
in regard to that object. A definite emotion corresponded to
each primary instinct, according to him, and this emotion, like
the instinct itself, was simple and indivisible. To the instinct of
flight, for instance, there corresponded an emotion of fear,
to the instinct of curiosity an emotion of wonder, to the instinct
of pugnacity an emotion of anger, to the parental instinct an
emotion of gentleness, and so on.

In extending his theory to society, McDougall put a definite
instinct, or group of instincts, under every social phenomenon.
He explained war, for instance, by people’s predisposition to
pugnacity, and the accumulation of social wealth to an inclina-
tion to money-grubbing and miserliness. Religion was based on
a combination of the instincts of curiosity, self-humiliation,
and flight taken together with the emotional reactions intrinsic
in the parental instinct. He attached very great social signifi-
cance to the herd instinct that held people together and underlay
most of the institutions of society. A direct manifestation of
the herd instinct was the growth of towns, the collective charac-
ter of human leisure, mass gatherings, etc.

The success of McDougall’s book, which was reprinted many
times, stimulated the appearance of many followers. The Eng-
lish surgeon Wilfred Trotter (1872-1939) became famous for
a book in which he claimed that all social phenomena were
ultimately explainable by ‘herd instincts’. The English Fabian
socialist Graham Wallas (1858-1932) extended psychological
analysis to the sphere of politics, paying special attention to
the instinct of loyalty, which ensured the functioning of state
power.'? The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-
1939) considered sexual desire, or libido, the universal de-
terminant of human behaviour. From study of neuroses and the
inner conflicts of the individual psyche, he subsequently, begin-
ning with his Totem and Taboo (1913), extended his theory
also to the history of culture. Later, on the basis of the experi-
ence of World War I, he was already speaking of a struggle of

102

two principles of the human psyche—Eros, or the instinct of
life, and Thanatos, or the unconscious desire for death (death
wish or death instinct).

Instinctivism had a definite influence on the science of
man by drawing attention to the unconscious components of
the psyche and also by its polemic against behaviourism. But
its own theoretical basis was more than unstable. Instinctivism
replaced social, historical regularities by individual, psycholog-
ical ones, and tried to give the latter a biological foundation.
Not only the content, but also the number of ‘basic instincts’
varied from one author to another. McDougall named 11 at
first, then 14, and finally 18, which he later renamed ‘inclina-
tions’ under the impact of criticism by behaviourists. William
James reckoned them at 38; Freud reduced them to two. When
Lister Bernard'* analysed the meaning of this term in the
literature, he counted 15,789 separate instincts, which con-
densed into 6,131 instincts of independent ‘essence’. Precepts,
habits, needs, affects, and psychic processes figured under to
term ‘instincts’.

It is not surprising that, as sociology and psychology devel-
oped, the influence of instinctivist theories rapidly died away.
The exception was Freudism, but its influence on sociology
came later in time, so that I shall not discuss it here.

4. Folk Psychology

All the theories I have named looked for a very simple ‘cell’
of social behaviour in the psyche of the individual, and in that
sense were subjective idealist. But in nineteenth-century science
there was also an objective idealist treatment of social conscious-
ness, which had its ideological roots in Hegel’s theory of the
‘objective spirit’ and the German Romantics’ conception of the
‘folk spirit’. These conceptions were based not so much on
psychology as on the history of language and literature, and
especially folklore, which convincingly demonstrated the exis-
tence of certain stable, repeated elements and structures of a
supraindividual character in the development of culture. What
was the nature of this ‘fold spirit’, or ‘national character’?
The Romantics interpreted it in an objective idealist, substan-

103

tional sense, as a special mental or spiritual reality. But the
concept gradually acquired another, naturalist content.

The German scientists Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903) and
Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899), having made a synthesis
of the data of linguistic and ethnography with the psycho-
logical theory of J. F. Herbart, announced in 1860 the cre-
ation of a new discipline ‘folk psychology’. According to Stein-
thal, all individuals of a nation (folk) bore the impress of its
special nature on their bodies and minds, because of the unity
of their origin and habitat, the effect of the bodily influences
on the mind, moreover, evoking certain bents, tendencies,
predispositions, and properties of the mind, identical for all of
them, as a consequence of which they all possessed an identical
folk spirit. He understood folk spirit as the psychic similarity
of the individuals belonging to a certain nation, and at the
same time as their self-awareness; the content of the folk spirit
was disclosed through study of language, myths, morals, and
culture in the context of the historical psychology of peoples
and psychological ethnology.

Although Steinthal and Lazarus could not fulfil this pro-
gramme, their ideas were taken up and developed by Wilhelm
Wundt. In his opinion physiological psychology did not embrace
the true content of mature consciousness. Higher psychic pro-
cesses, above all thinking, were the result of the development
of a community of people, and should therefore be studied by
a special science. He objected to his predecessors’ direct analogy
of the individual and folk consciousness. Just as the conscious-
ness of the individual was not reducible to the initial elements
of sensation and feeling, but was a creative synthesis of them,
so folk consciousness was a creative synthesis of individual
consciousnesses, through which a new reality arose that was
discoverable in the products of suprapersonal activity, i.e.,
language, myths, and morals. Wundt devoted the last 20 years
of his life to investigating them; the results of this work were
embodied in the ten volumes of his Vélkerspsychologie (Folk
Psychology).

Like his predecessors Wundt did not manage to fulfil his
programme. The historical, cultural, and ethnographic material
did not fit into the simple psychological schemes, the more
so that Wundt, wanting to demonstrate the universality of the

104

laws of physiological psychology, in fact tried to subordinate
the supraindividual reality of the folk spirit to them. In one
of his works he wrote that it had been ruled out from the very
beginning that any universal laws appeared in folk psychology
that were not already fully contained in the laws of individual
consciousness.'* He treated the separate forms of social con-
sciousness as ‘psychological’ and not as ‘socio-logical’ phenomena.
He thus brought out the laws of language by analogy with the
laws of the association of notions, myths as the result of the
processing of notions by emotions, and morals as a consequence
of the inclusion of will among the primary elements of con-
sciousness.

Folk Psychology was one of the first attempts to concep-
tualise and begin a concrete study of the interaction of culture
and individual consciousness. The orientation to bringing to-
gether psychological, ethnographic, linguistic, historical-phil-
ological, and anthropological research was itself above all valu-
able. Historical psychology, cultural anthropology, ethno-
psychology, and even sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics find
their sources, not without grounds, in the Vdlkerpsychologie.
But its influence on sociology seems to have been minimal.
The theoretical problem of the relation of culture and individ-
ual consciousness remained fundamentally unresolved in it,
while the descriptive material actually had nothing in common
with the explanatory conceptions.

5. Group Psychology and the Theory of Imitation

At the end of the nineteenth century it had become increasingly
clear that neither the psychology of the individual nor the
abstract ‘folk spirit? could provide the key to inderstanding
social phenomena. Hence the mounting interest in direct study
of phenomena of group and mass behaviour and the psycho-
logical and social mechanisms that made possible transmis-
sion of social norms and beliefs, and adaptation of individuals
to one another.

The interest of sociologists in the psychology of the masses
also had its ideological sources. The ruling classes, terrified
by the revolutionary actions of the working people in 1789,

105

1830, and 1848, saw a terrible, destructive force in the masses.
The Romantic traditionalists of the early nineteenth century
warned that the turning of society into a mass society entailed
death of creative individuality and culture. The actions of the
Parisian proletariat in 1848 and 1871 strengthened that mood
even more. In the second half of the century ideas about the
irrationality of the masses became very common both in positiv-
ist philosophy (Taine, especially in his treatment of the French
Revolution) and an antipositivist philosophy (Nietzsche). The
Italian criminologist Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) gave this idea
a pseudoscientific psychological substantiation in his La folla
criminale (The Criminal Crowd) (1891) and La psychologie
des sectes (Psychology of Sects) (1895). Man, he wrote, was
brutal and criminal by nature. The weakening of rational
self-control inevitable in a crowd, unleashed those instincts,
heightening the individual’s suggestibility and his receptivity
to any evil.

At the turn of the century the books of the French publi-
cist, Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a doctor by training, became
very popular: La psychologie des foules (The Psychology of
Crowds) (1895) and Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des
peuples (The Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples)
(1894). In his opinion European society was entering a new
period of development, the ‘crowd age’ in which the rational
critical principle embodied in the individual would be over-
whelmed by irrational mass consciousness. The ‘crowd’ or
‘the mass’ was a group of people gathered together in one place,
inspired by common feelings, and ready to follow its leader
wherever he liked. No rational force could control the violent
impulses of mass consciousness. Le Bon stressed that the course
of each person’s thought in a crowd was directed by its common
mood. The longer a person remained in a crowd, the weaker
his feeling of reality became and the more he became subject
to the influence of the leader. People were often found among
the leaders with sharply expressed features of psychic devia-
tions. Le Bon sharply condemned any revolutionary movement,
especially socialism from that position.

Knowledge of the psychology of crowds is a resource of the
statesman who wants not to govern them—that has become very

106

difficult today—but at least not to be too completely governed by
them.’ *

The theoretical problems posed by Le Bon—the anonymity,
psychological contagion, and the suggestibility of the ‘crowd
man’—gave an impulse to serious social psychological studies.
But his theory was reactionary and scientifically unsound on
the whole, above all his identification of the masses of the
people and the irrational ‘mob’. His ‘ideal crowd’, i.e., a com-
pletely chance, amorphous gathering of individuals, was seldom
encountered in practice, in any case as a socially significant
force, and not just as a simple street crowd of idlers; the latter
was the most elementary, and the lowest, possibly, initial form
of all of socio-psychological entity. Modern social psychologists
note a number of other flaws in Le Bon’s conceptions: the
extremely blurred character of his basic concepts; the unsub-
stantiated counterposing of the irrational mob to an idealised
image of the rational individual; the substitution of terms, as
a consequence of which observations of the behaviour of crim-
inal gangs were extrapolated onto qualitatively different forms
of group behaviour; the arbitrary postulate of the ‘collective
spirit’; the unsystematic character of the proofs, which served
rather as illustrations of an a priori thesis.’ °

The group psychology of the turn of the century was not
just speculative constructs of that type. Not only was the
amorphous ‘crowd’ studied, but also concrete human groups,
diads and triads, and also such processes of interpersonal rela-
tionship as mental contagion, suggestion, and imitation.

This orientation drew inspiration from very diverse sources,
including experimental studies of hypnosis, observations of
the imitative activity of children, ethnological studies, and
observations of such phenomena as fashion or panic. The first
studies of this kind were not distinguished by either method-
ological or conceptual rigour. Some authors (N. K. Mikhai-
lovsky) were inclined to consider mental contagion as a funda-
mental process underlying people’s uniform social behaviour
in groups; others (V. M. Bekhterev, Gustave Le Bon) assigned
this role to suggestion; others still (Gabriel de Tarde,J. M. Bald-
win) gave preference to imitation. The relation of these pro-
cesses was also defined differently. Whereas Vigouroux and

107

Juquelier considered mental contagion a form of imitation,'’
Le Bon, on the contrary, saw in it a partial case of mental
contagion. In all cases, however, the object of study was group
processes, which were assigned a specific methodological and
ontological status.

The outstanding figure of this school was the French lawyer
and sociologist Gabriel de Tarde (1843-1904), author of Crimi-
nalité comparée (1886), Les lois de limitation (1890), Logique
sociale (1895), Les lois sociales (1898), Etudes de psychologie
sociale (1898), L’opinion et la foule (1901), Psychologie écono-
mique (1902). Apart from philosophers and sociologists (among
them Montesquieu, Comte, Spencer, Mill, and Cournot), the
Italian criminalist school (Cesare Lombroso, Raffaele Garofalo,
Enrico Ferri, and others) had a marked influence on his views.
But in opposition to these Italians, who traced crime from racial
and geographical conditions, Trade attached decisive importance
to its social and psychological factors.

For many years Tarde waged a bitter polemic against his
junior contemporary and intellectual rival Emile Durkheim.
Both thinkers had risen from polemics against bio-organic
theories and utilitarianism; both attached great significance to
ethnographic data and the comparative method; both were
interested in the nature of social standards, seeing in them the
force that integrated society. But behind this similarity there
were profound differences. For Durkheim society was a social
system sui generis, a product of which was the separate in-
dividual.

Tarde, on the contrary, spoke from the standpoint of nomi-
nalism; for him society was only a product of the interactions
of individuals. He considered any analogies between society
and a biological organism or mechanical aggregate to be fruit-
less. Consciousness, according to him, was a postulate of me-
chanics. He also rejected the evolutionist model of society. The
trouble with sociology, according to him, was that it confused
‘laws of society’ and ‘laws of history’; but the first were essen-
tially laws of the reproduction of phenomena, while the second
were laws of their development. They were two different classes
of laws; the laws of history, moreover, were much more com-
plex, and could only be formulated from the laws of society.

Hence he substituted an analytical approach for the evolu-

108

oe

tionary one. Sociology was ‘simply ... collective psychology’, ®
which should answer two questions.

Sociology, as just defined, must attack two major problems: 1. What
is the cause of inventions, of successful initiatives, of the social
adaptations analogous to and no less obscure in their origin than
biological adaptations? 2. Why were these initiatives imitated,
and not others? Why was the preference accorded to such and such
a model, among so many others which did not find any imitators?
In other words, what are the laws of imitation?! °

Tarde consistently rejected every attempt to postulate the
existence of independent spiritual entities of the type of ‘group
consciousness’ or ‘spirit of the crowd’, considering such doc-
trines survivals of mysticism. But he could not base sociology
either on the principles of individualist psychology. If the vari-
ous ‘I’s’ were completely heterogeneous and had nothing in
common with one another, how could they transmit or com-
municate anything to each other? And how could they associate
and form an ‘ourself’, a ‘we’ (un ‘nous’)?

Collective psychology, inter-mental psychology, that is, sociology,
is thus possible only because individual psychology, intra-mental
psychology, includes elements which can be transmitted and com-
municated from one consciousness to others, elements which,
despite the irreducible hiatus between individuals, are capable of
uniting and joining together in order to form true social forces and
quantities, currents of opinion or popular impulses, traditions of
national customs.?°

The elementary social relation, according to Tarde, was the
transmission, or attempt to transmit, a belief or wish. The
simplest model of that was the state of hypnotic sleep. ‘Society
is imitation, and imitation is a kind of somnambulism,’?!

Any innovation, he considered, was the product of individual
creative work, the sole source of which was a creative act of
the imagination of a gifted individual. Successful adaptation
of the innovation gave rise to a wave of repetitions taking the
form of ‘imitation’. Tarde drew a schematic picture of the way
an innovation was spread by imitation in the form of concentric

109

circles spreading from the centre. The circle of imitation had
a tendency to spread endlessly until it ran into an approaching
wave coming from another centre. The streams of imitation
coming from opposite directions began to struggle, repetition
gave way to opposition, and a ‘logical duel’ of imitations began.
Any conflict, from a theoretical dispute to a war, could be a
particular case of this. Logical duels could have various results,
but a new adaptation somehow succeeded opposition, and
the whole cycle of social processes was renewed.

Tarde divided the basic laws of sociology, which embraced
all three basic social processes (adaptation, repetition, and
opposition), into the logical and the extralogical. Logical laws
explained why one innovation spread and another did not, how
the need for a certain innovation matured, whether it was
compatible with already existing knowledge and notions (logical
union) or conflicted with it (logical duel). Extralogical laws
showed how the process of imitation proceeded; for example,
that it went from a centre to the periphery, from the highest
to the lowest, from ends to means, etc.

Although Tarde built his theory as a deductive one, he at-
tached immense importance to empirical methods of investiga-
tion. In his opinion sociology had two chief methods at its
disposal—the archaeological and the statistical. The archaeologi-
cal method (it will be readily recognised as a description of the
historical method) was based on analysis of historical docu-
ments and was used to study periods and areas of the spread
of concrete innovations and models. The statistical method
was employed to gather information about current processes
of imitation by way of computing similar imitative acts and
plotting imitative flow spread curves. Analysis of the statistics
of suicides, crimes, railway traffic, and trade made it possible
to find a quantitative expression of the imitative force of an
innovation, and to bring out the favourable or unfavourable
consequences of its spread, and ultimately to bring spontaneous,
elemental social (imitative) processes under control. Tarde
saw the highroad for the development of sociology in broad
application of ‘number and measure’ to the study of society.
His socio-statistical studies, in particular on matters of crime,
enjoyed great authority among his contemporaries.

The most important sphere he applied his theoretical theses

110

to was public opinion and ‘crowd psychology’. His book L’opi-
nion et la foule recalls Le Bon in its range of ideas and concepts,
but Tarde criticised the concept of a substantial ‘collective
mind’ existing outside or above the consciousness of individ-
uals. He also did not agree with the claim that the twentieth
century would be the ‘mob age’. In his opinion it would rather
be the age of the public or publics, which was quite another
matter.

In his description of ‘crowds’ and ‘criminal sects’ Tarde,
like his predecessors, stressed the irrationality, imitativeness,
and need for leaders. But he turned his main attention not to
that but to the process of the differentiation of public opinion
and of the forming of a public on that basis. In contrast to
the crowd, the psychic unity of which was primarily created
by physical contact, a public was

a purely spiritual collectivity, a dissemination of physically separate
individuals, whose cohesion is wholly mental.??

Opinion is to the public, in modern times, what the soul is to the
body.??

By approaching the problem simultaneously in an analytical
and a historical way, Tarde traced the stages of the forming
of the public, considering it a product of modern times. The
prehistory of the public was in the salons and clubs of the
eighteenth century, but its real history began with the appear-
ance of newspapers. While the individual personality was levelled
in the crowd, it got a chance of self-expression in the public.
Perfecting of the means of communion in it also furthered
complication and enrichment of the personality, the more so
that there was not just one public in a society but several
different types.

Tarde did not limit himself to these general considerations
but gave a very precise psychological analysis of the different
forms of mass communication and interpersonal communion,
in particular conversation. His observations largely anticipated
the later development of the mass communication theory and
the psychology of intercourse. When one appraises his activity
as a whole, one must say that he promoted the posing and study

111

of many important problems. Together with George Simmel he
brought the matter of interpersonal relationships and its socio-
psychological mechanisms to the centre of scientific investiga-
tion. He is rightly regarded one of the founders of social psychol-
ogy as a science. The analytical approach that he substantiat-
ed, his critique of evolutionism, and his interest in ecology and
technology, were also very important for the history of soci-
ology. His direct influence in France was comparatively slight,
but his ideas got broad recognition in the USA.J. M. Baldwin,
who had reached practically the same conclusions independent-
ly of him, relying on the data of genetic psychology, called
Tarde one of the most authoritative and outstanding con-
temporary authors in sociology and social psychology. Franz
Boas (1858-1942), the head of the cultural-historical trend in
American anthropology, considered The Laws of Imitation an
outstanding book. The conception of one of the leading US
psychosociologists, Edward Ross, were largely shaped by the
influence of Tarde.

But the reduction of sociology to ‘intermental psychology’
in the end led up a blind alley, since the researcher lost sight
of the macrosocial structure within which, and under whose
influence, interpersonal relations were shaped and moulded.
Although Tarde paid great attention to technology in his clas-
sification of inventions and innovations, material relations were
partly dissolved in mental ones with him.

Having limited the social process to a context of mental
relationships, Tarde could not escape from the logical circle in
his interpretation of them. He deduced the individual’s psy-
chology and behaviour from imitation of external models and
innovations, and treated them, in turn, as the product of the
creative acitivity of individuals. He did not in general examine
the origin of models for imitation sociologically. Their source
was a creative act of the individual’s imagination, while ‘the
laws of invention belong essentially to individual logic’.?4

Such obvious idealism shocked even such a spokesman of
‘subjective sociology’ as N. K. Mikhailovsky, who wrote, not
without irony, that

the moments that prepare a sharp display of moral contagion are
reduced, only slowly and quietly, for Tarde to this moral contagion,

112

which is expressed in propaganda and the mastery of new ideas.
The events marked by the ideas of Luther and Mintzer occurred in
history not because the oppression of the feudal, Catholic system
became intolerable, but because Luther’s ideas spread.? 5

The psychological content of the ‘theory of imitation’ was
also subjected to serious criticism. Wundt had already drawn
attention to the vagueness of this concept, which was more
often than not a vulgar psychological description of an associ-
ative process unlike imitation in the proper sense of the term.
Durkheim pointed out that

one cannot designate by the same term the process by virtue of
which a collective sentiment takes shape within a certain group of
men, that from which our sticking to general or traditional rules
of conduct results, and finally that which drives the sheep of Pa-
nurge to threw themselves into the water because one of them has
begun to. It is another matter to feel in common, another thing to
bow to the authority of opinion, and another thing, finally, to
automatically repeat what others have done.?°

Many of the ‘laws’ formulated by Tarde were also problem-
atic. The thesis that imitation proceeded ‘from the internal to
the external’ was connected with a theory that arrived at an
act of behaviour from conscious motives. But imitation or the
assimilation of a new model often began from external, super-
ficial features, and consciousness came only subsequently in
an already established expressive form. The ‘law’ that imitation
always flowed ‘from top to bottom’, from the ruling classes to
the oppressed, though supported by many facts, was also not
universal, because it rested on an idea of the inevitability of
a stratified system of society; it is well known that many in-
novations in the sphere of culture arose first among the op-
pressed, and were later assimilated by the dominant classes
(suffice it to recall Christianity).

The theory of imitation went beyond the framework of
intra-mental processes, making the object and unit of sociologi-
cal research the process of interpersonal relationships and not the

113
8~1147

individual taken separately. But as we have just seen, it under-
stood this relationship in an even more external and mechanical
way.

6. The Birth of Interactionism

The interactionist orientation that arose in the USA was an
attempt to overcome this weakness by combining psychologism
with organicism. It was centred on the interaction of individ-
uals. The individual person who figured as the subject of this
interaction was understood not as an abstract individual but as
a social being belonging to definite social groups and performing
a certain social role. The counterposing of the individual to
society gave way to the idea of their interpenetration.

The idea was not new philosophically, of course. Its first
embodiment in psychology was the theory of William James
(1842-1910). Defining the content of the Empirical Self as ‘all
that he is tempted to call by the name of me’, James distin-
guished three elements in it: (1) ‘the material self’, including
the body, clothing, family, and property; (2) ‘the social self’,
i, €., the recognition the individual received from his surround-
ings; our surroundings being heterogeneous, one may say that
man possesses as many different social selves as there exist
different groups of people, whose opinion he appreciates; (3)
‘the spiritual self’, i.e., the aggregate of his mental, spiritual
capacities and inclinations.” ”

The inclusion of social moments in the structure of the
personality and its self-awareness was very fruitful. The next
step in that direction was taken by one of the founders of
modern genetic psychology James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934),
the author of Mental Development of the Child and the Race
(1896) and Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Devel-
opment (1897).

Baldwin’s general principles were very close to Tarde’s
theory, but whereas the sociologist Tarde went from group
processes to the individual, the psychologist Baldwin went from
the individual to society. From the standpoint of psychology,
he wrote, social organisation coincided with the organisation
of the individual and of his self-awareness. The structure of the

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= —

personality and of his/her self-awareness, according to him, did
not simply ‘reflect’ the organisation of society but was identical
with it.

The sociological aspect of this problem was studied by Prof.
Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) at the University of Mi-
chigan. He called his approach ‘organic’, not in the sense of bio-
logical organicism, but because he started from recognition of
the initial unity of the individual and society. ‘The organic
view,’ he wrote, ‘stresses both the unity of the whole and the
peculiar value of the individual, explaining each by the other.’?°
It was as senseless to analyse the social consciousness of the
group and the consciousness of the individual separately as to
counterpose the music of the whole orchestra to the sound
of the separate instruments. The ‘individual’ and ‘society’ were
not two different entities but different aspects of the study
of the life process of human interaction, which could be exam-
ined either from the aspect of the individual and his self-aware-
ness, of the dynamics of the social self, or from the aspect
of social institutions and fixed types of intercourse.

Cooley dissociated himself equally from both the ‘nominal-
ist’ and the ‘realist’ extremes.

Is society anything more than the sum of the individuals? In a
sense, Yes. There is an organization, a life-process, in any social
whole that you cannot see in the individuals separately. To study
them one by one and attempt to understand society by putting
them together will lead you astray. It is ‘individualism’ in a bad
sense of the word.??

Cooley devoted his first book Human Nature and the Social
Order (1902) to study of the individual, personal aspect of the
‘life social process’. In his second book Social Organization
(1909) he was already examining society from the angle of the
social whole. Its sub-title ‘A Study of the Larger Mind’ indicat-
ed that its attention was mainly directed to social consciousness,
not reducible to the consciousness of separate individuals. But
the principle of the approach was one and the same.

Cooley counterposed his treatment of human nature to
instinctivist and mechanistic interpretations. In his view one
could not attach the significance of universal motives of social

115
&*

behaviour to instincts. The diverse facts of social life demon-
strated the variability of the motives of man’s behaviour, the
absence of a single law governing his actions. Human nature
was plastic and mobile; it could be compelled to work in
practically any direction when its laws were properly under-
stood.

The interpretation of the individual by means of the prin-
ciple of ‘imitation’ was just as unsatisfactory. It is no easier for
a child to repeat something after an adult, a word, say, than
for an adult to learn a musical piece of average difficulty.
Furthermore, adults imitate a baby in its first year more than
it imitates them.

Cooley considered it a sign ofa truly social being, a capac-
ity to distinguish himself from the group, to be aware of his
self and his personality. But a sine qua non of the development
of self-awareness was communication with other people and
assimilation of their opinions about himself. ‘There is no sense
of “I’’, as in pride or shame, without its correlative sense of you,
or he, or they.’°° Conscious activity, according to him, was
always social activity. And to act socially meant to coordinate
one’s activity with those notions of ‘I’ that other people had
formed. ‘As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflec-
tion, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters
in which we see it.’>/ Our Self is moulded through a summa-
tion of the impressions it seems to us we are making on those
around us. According to Cooley’s conception of ‘the looking-
glass self’, the human ‘I’ includes (1) a notion of ‘how I seem
to another person’, (2) a notion of ‘how that other values my
image’, and (3) specific feeling in the nature of pride or humilia-
tion, stemming from that.

Every act of social consciousness was simultaneously ,accord-
ing to Cooley, an act of self-awareness. Society reveals the
individual in the form of social aspects of his own personality.
But the individual’s social consciousness did not coincide with
the consciousness of all society. The latter went beyond the
bounds of a person’s inner world. It was a broader conscious-
ness (larger mind), which Cooley sometimes designated by the
term ‘public mind’ to contrast it with the individual mind. The
unity of the ‘public mind’ consisted in the organisation, inter-
action and causal connection of its parts, rather than in similar-

116

7, te

32 The sources of social organisation lay in the ‘primary

ity.
group’.

Cooley called the co-operation and association of individuals
directly interacting with one another face to face the primary
group. It was a small circle of people who maintained stable
close relations distinguished as a rule by intimacy, mutual
affection and understanding. The primary group included
persons about whom one could say ‘We’. Examples of such
groups were ‘the play-group of children’, the family, and the
neighbourhood. It was in them that the individual first acquired
a feeling of social belonging and assimilated common ideals.
He called these groups ‘the nursery of human nature’.2? He
was well aware that primary groups were ‘not independent of
the larger society, but to some extent reflect its spirit’;?>* and
also that rivalry, competition, and hostility existed in them,
as well as harmony. But he stressed that it was the primary
groups that constituted the basis of what is universal in human
nature and human ideals, and that their ‘primariness’ lay chiefly
in their being ‘fundamental in forming the social nature and
ideals of the individual’.>*

Cooley’s theory of the ‘looking-glass self’, which developed
in the stream of the old philosophical tradition (the idea that
self-awareness was shaped through intercourse and exchange of
opinions with other people existed already in Adam Smith),
was further developed in the works of G. H. Mead and so-called
symbolic interactionism. The concept of the primary group,
forgotten in the 1930s, has again become popular in studies of
socialisation and the theory of small groups.

Cooley’s sociology had the same shortcomings, however,
as the other varieties of psychologism.

He combined the emphasis on the subjective-personality
aspect of the social process (although he stipulated its condi-
tional character) with a clear ignoring of material, production
processes. It was not simply a matter of awkward formula-
tions like ‘society... is a relation among personal ideas’.’° His
methodology was an immanent-idealist one, since the social
interaction during which the self-aware individual was moulded,
was reduced in practice to a process of inter-personal inter-
course which excluded from it material activity, work, and the
attitude to the macrosocial system that any primary group was

117

a part of. The objective system of relations of production and
the class structure of society seemed less essential in this con-
ception than the relationship of individuals ‘face to face’. Even
Mead, who highly appreciated Cooley’s theory, noted the il-
legitimacy of reducing the social interaction of individuals to
their exchange of opinions with one another. Cooley’s psycho-
logical introspectivism, according to Mead, carried with it ‘the
implication of complete solipsism’, since with him ‘society
really has no existence except in the individual’s mind, and
the concept of the self as in any sense intrinsically social is a
product of imagination’.*”

Even allowing for its subsequent development in Mead’s
works, and his followers, the interactionist orientation, fruitful
in the context of a socio-psychological study of interpersonal
relations, proved inadequate to describe and explain macro-

social processes, class relations, and the nature of political
power.

7. Psychological Sociology in the Historical Perspective

What were the main results of psychological sociology at the
turn of the century?

Its attention was centred on problems of social (group,
collective) consciousness, and its nature, structure, and func-
tions. The most important processes and psychological mechan-
isms of group and interpersonal relationships were discussed
in detail, viz., mental contagion, suggestion, imitation, and the
social content of the human personality itself. The foundation
was laid then of the theoretical, and later empirical study of
public opinion and mass communication. Psychosociologists,
rejecting the biologisation of society, also tried to overcome
the limited character of evolutionism; their theoretical concep-
tions became increasingly analytical. A very important positive
result of that was the rise of social psychology as an independ-
ent discipline, although, having emerged at the boundary of
sociology and psychology, this new discipline for some time
still had no clearly defined subject-matter, being pulled by
turns to both of its ‘progenitors’.

But study of the processes of group relations, while neces-

118

sary, by no means exhausted the sphere of the social, and did
not justify the reducing of sociology to social psychology that
was extremely typical of all the schools concerned. For Tarde
social, or inter-mental psychology was a synonym in essence
for sociology; he did not draw meaningful differences between
them. Le Bon, Baldwin, McDougall, and Cooley by turns called
their approach sometimes social psychological and sometimes
sociological. The idea of merging of sociology and social psy-
chology was actively propagated by the American sociologist
Charles Ellwood (1873-1948). Another influential American
sociologist, Edward Alsworth Ross (1866-1951), author of a
popular textbook of social psychology, considered it a part of
sociology, dividing the latter into social psychology (whose
subject-matter was the psychological processes arising in an
association of people) and social morphology, i.e., the science
of social forms.?®

Even when attention was concentrated on general social
problems and relations (Cooley’s theory of social organisation,
or Ross’s theory of social control), they were interpreted as
‘clusters’ of interpersonal relations or as specific aspects of
them.

The reduction of social relations to ‘inter-mental’ interaction,
and sociology to social psychology was nothing else than a
hidden form of philosophical idealism. For Marxian sociolo-
gists there is no question whether it is necessary to ‘recognise’
the significance of mental factors, social orientations, motives,
etc.; the pioblem is how to connect these thoughts and feelings
with the law-governed movement of macrosocial processes.
The social cannot be reduced to the ‘interpersonal’, since
people are involved in socio-production relations ‘not as individ-
uals but as members of a class’,?” and their social functions
and their ‘distinctive social characters are, therefore, by no
means due to individual human nature as such’,*° but to a
certain division of the social system.

Notes

' John Stuart Mill. System of Logic. Ratiocinative and Inductive
(Longmans, Green, London, 1889), p 573.

119

2 Tbid., p 571.

3 Lester F. Ward. The Psychic Factors of Civilization (Ginn & Co.,
Boston, Mass., 1906), p 123.

* F.H. Giddings. The Principles of Sociology. An Analysis of the
Phenomena of Association and of Social Organization (MacMillan & Co.,
London, 1924), p 16.

5 Ibid., p 420.

® Ibid.

7 Ibid., p 13.

8 Ibid., p 17.

9 F, H. Giddings, Studies in the Theory of Human Society (The Mac-
millan & Co., New York, 1926), p. 252.

*° Nicholas S. Timasheff. Sociological Theory. Its Nature and Growth
(Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1955), pp 138-140.

1! Wilfred Trotter. Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (The Mac-
millan Co., New York, 1947).

12 Graham Wallas. Human Nature in Politics (Constable & Co., Lon-
don, 1910).

'? Lister L. Bernard. Instinct. A Study in Social Psychology (Holt,
New York, 1924),

'* Wilhelm Wundt. Logik der Geisteswissenschaften. In: Logik, Vol.
3, (Verlag von F. Enke, Stuttgart, 1908), p 227.

1S Gustave Le Bon. Psychologie des foules (Alcan, Paris, 1918), p 17.

16 Stanley Milgram and Hans Toch. Collective Behavior: Crowds and
Social Movement. In: Gardner Lindsey and Elliot Aronson (Eds.) The
Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. 4 (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.,
Reading, Mass.,1969), pp 507-611.

*7 A. Vigouroux, P. Juquelier. La contagion mentale (Doin, Paris,
1905).

18 Gabriel Tarde. On Communication and Social Influence (Univ. of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1969), p 73.

1° Ibid., p 104.

2° Tbid., p 95.

21 G. Tarde. Les lois de limitation. Etude sociologique (Alcan, Paris,
1890), p 97.

22 G. Tarde. L’opinion et la foule (Alcan, Paris, 1910), p 2.

23 Ibid., p 63.

24 G. Tarde. Les lois de limitation, p 415.

?5 N. K. Mikhailovsky. Geroi i tolpa (Heroes and the Crowd). Col-
lected Works, Vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp 434-435.

120

76 Emile Durkheim. Le suiside. Etude de sociologie (Alcan, Paris,
1897), pp 114-115.

?7 William James. The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (Henry Holt
& Co., New York, 1893), pp 291-305.

28 C.H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (Schocken
Books, New York, 1964), p 36.

29 Ibid., p 48.

3° Jbid., p 182.

31 Jbid., p 247.

3? Lewis A. Coser. Masters of Sociological Thought (Harcourt Brace
Jowanovich, New York, 1977), p 312.

33 C,H. Cooley. Social Organization. A Study of the Larger Mind
(Schocken Books, New York, 1967), p 24.

34 [bid., p 27.

35 Tbid., p 23.

36 C. H. Cooley. Human Nature and the Social Order, p 119.

37 George H. Mead. Mind, Self and Society. From the Standpoint
of a Social Behaviorist (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1946), p 224.

38 E. A. Ross. Social Psychology. An Outline and Source Book (The
Macmillan Co., New York, 1917).

3° Kart Marx and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology (Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1976), p. 88.

4° Karl Marx. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), p 95.

6

EMPIRICAL SOCIAL STUDIES
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Marina Kovaleva

Empirical social studies have a longer history than academic
sociology. They were being made in England and France in
the seventeenth century at least from the time of ‘political
arithmetic’ and ‘social physics’, and long before the advent
of the word ‘sociology’ itself. They were an important and
independent source of conceptions, quantitative methods, and
techniques of measurement and statistical description for
modern sociology.

The history of empirical studies has been systematically
developed only recently, from roughly the 1960s. In spite of
the appearance of general works on the history of these studies,
and of works on the evolution of their methods and techniques,
historians of sociology still have to fill the gap between the
paucity of studies of its development as an empirical science
and the broad descriptions of the forming of sociological
theories.

In the early stages of the shaping of sociology, its theory
and empirical social studies developed along parallel lines and
were poorly linked with one another. That latter were stimulat-
ed by pressing practical needs, and the need to gather informa-
tion to substantiate social reforms in response to the acute
problems of nineteenth-century capitalist society, i.e., the
rapid growth of towns and of the urban population during
industrialisation, the polarisation of poverty and wealth, paupe-
risation, the increase in crime, and the general intensification

122

of class struggle. As social problems became more complex,
the bourgeois public was more and more alarmed by the ‘poor’
as a constant potential threat to the foundations of society.
This general interest in social problems and the heightened
needs of public administration were not met by the existing
system of obtaining social information through church parishes
and the government financial inspectorate. In the early nine-
teenth century official institutions, philanthropic organisations,
and private persons (doctors, teachers, employers, natural
scientists, independently selecting the object and method of
organising their studies, and also parliamentary and mixed
commissions including members of the public, were involved
in all kinds of censuses, polls, and statistical studies.

Official studies were dictated by the needs of government,
and the need for detailed knowledge of various aspects of
public affairs. In order to control social changes, bourgeois
governments tried to create constantly operating institutions
to gather information, for example, to carry out a regular
general census. Private studies were associated with the activity
of philanthropic organisations or opposition parties. Initially
in England, and then in other countries, philanthropic social-
study commissions and statistical societies were founded to
carry out social investigations so as to inform and mobilise
public opinion, and draw the attention of official circles to
some negative phenomenon, to discover its causes, and to work
out recommendations for ‘treating social ills’ and improving
social institutions. Most of the conclusions from the nineteenth-
century empirical studies did not go beyond the bounds of
moderately liberal, bourgeois-reformist views.

Because of the uncoordinated, fragmentary, and heterogene-
ous character of these studies (both by subject and composi-
tion), and because of their divorce from sociological theory
and the universities, the empirical tradition broke off, or was
interrupted, and valuable experience was lost. The logic of
the development of sociology as a science required an empirical
base for checking theoretical propositions. But the need for
empirical data for that purpose remained very weak until soci-
ology had actually been established as a university discjpline.’
University sociologists were traditionally occupied mainly with
philosophico-historical subjects and were involved in social

123

investigations as ordinary citizens, made uneasy by social
misfortunes and interested in immediate practical results, and
not as professionals.? Attempts to unite theoretical sociology
and social research in the activity of one scholar were crowned
with success later, in the time of Durkheim.

But gradually, all the same, there was a professionalisation
of activity in the gathering and analysis of data. The proportion
of private persons (amateurs concerning themselves with empir-
ical studies) fell, and the number of professors correspondingly
rose. The example of England is indicative; there the proportion
of the latter rose from 2 per cent in 1834-54 to 14 per cent in
1855-74, and to 24 per cent in 1875-1900.° As specialisation
grew, there was a differentiation of the various types of social
information in the amorphous mass of concrete studies. Demog-
raphy and statistics hived off as independent disciplines; the
foundations were laid of the future understanding of concrete
sociological research as a complex social investigation synthesis-
ing the data of contiguous sciences, the results of its authors’
personal field observations, and secondary analysis of already
existing demographic, economic, and other data.

1. Empirical Social Studies in the United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom the first half of the nineteenth century
was a period of reform of outdated social institutions: the
system of education, public health, local government, the
electoral system, and Parliament. The first Poor Laws were
passed. Social studies, which took the form as a rule of statistical
investigations and censuses, were a part of this broad reform
movement in social legislation and politics. Royal commissions
and consultative committees took on the trusteeship of private
initiative in these investigations, helping to broaden their scale
and at the same time to keep them within the context of the
permitted opposition. The conclusions of these commissions
led, in separate cases, to changes in the legislation in the fields
concerned.

John Sinclair’s monumental study (21 volumes) of rural life
and the rural population (The Statistical Account of Scotland),
the results of which were published between 1791 and 1825,

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greatly influenced the organisation of population censuses and
the content of their questionnaires in many countries in Europe.
Sinclair had drawn the Scottish clergy into his work, as was
usual at the time, and obtained data on 881 parishes of Scot-
land, He drew up list of questions containing 116 points, 40 of
which were devoted to the geography, mineral resources, and
history of the parish, 60 concerned its population (sex, age,
occupations and trades, religious affiliation, births, deaths,
suicides, murders, number of workless and chronic alcoholics,
etc.). The rest of the questions elucidated the state of agri-
culture and handicrafts.

Subsequent censuses and investigations were no longer
linked, in most cases, with the parish as the unit of observation,
since it had been disrupted as an administrative unit during the
industrial revolution. The main object of analysis became the
separate household.

Down to the 1840s many investigations were directed to
claryfying the position of the workers and poor strata of the
urban population—the problem of so-called social hygiene. The
initiators of these studies were often doctors, since they daily
came up against undernourishment and insanitary living condi-
tions in this milieu. Among them was one of the founders and
active members of the Manchester Statistical Society, James
Kay-Shuttleworth. He utilised his position as secretary of the
Manchester Board of Health to gather information on the sani-
tary conditions of the working people. He set up a network of
councils in the wards of the city and obtained the necessary
data through staff inspectors supplied with questionnaires.
The questions concerned the state of housing, the number of
tenants, the furniture, the state of clothing, the kind of employ-
ment, state of health, etc. From this investigation he published
his very significant survey The Moral and Physical Condition of
the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in
Manchester (1832), which became a model for subsequent fuller
studies.

The socio-political and intellectual climate in the United
Kingdom in the first third of the century led investigators and
statesmen to the idea of the necessity of setting up a statistical
service. From 1801 regular censuses were taken every ten years.
In the 1830s statistical societies were founded in many cities

125

that united enthusiasts of empirical social studies. Among them
was the Manchester Society mentioned above.** A statistical
section of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science was formed in 1833 and the London Statistical Society
founded in 1834, with the participation of Adolphe Quételet.
Their members shared the conviction that the facts discovered
by statistics were the sole unambiguous indicators for practical
actions. The gathering of facts, a clear orientation on urgent
social problems, and direct aid for the government were their
unitial aims.

In the London Statistical Society work was organised in four
branches of statistics, viz., economic, political, medical, and
‘moral and intellectual’, the dividing lines between which were
very vague. Most attention was paid to economic statistics, but
demographic studies, and study of the conditions of the poor,
predominated in ‘moral’ statistics.

Starting from the criteria of the economic and social progress
of capitalist society developed in the main by classical political
economy, the statisticians of the time employed tables in which,
for certain time intervals, economic and social indicators were
joined (variables of the market and variables of life expectancy,
fluctuations of prices or business activity, on the one hand,
and sanitary conditions, professional mobility, income, or educa-
tion, on the other), which served as indicators of national prog-
ress. From analysis of these tables, the connections of life
expectancy or other demographic indicators with the social
structure of society were elucidated. But in spite of all the new
indicators created, and of the improvements in the methods
of gathering and classifying the data, which disclosed possibili-
ties for interesting comparisons, the theoretical generalisation
of the assembled material was poor.

The need for a clear sociological conception for effective
use of empirical social studies is obvious when one compares the
liberal-reformist works mentioned above with Frederick Engels’
The Condition of the Working Class in England, which largely
telied on the same information. Engels built up the isolated
facts of the liberal statisticians, which did not get across to
public opinion precisely because of their fragmentary character,
into a balanced picture of the position of the main classes in
the socio-economic structure of capitalist society, while the

126

good intentions of the liberal policy of minor reforms were
replaced by a demand for sweeping changes in the main struc-
tural elements of society.

At the end of the 1840s there was a decline in England in
interest in the study of social problems, due in part to the main
aims of the reformers having been achieved; Parliament had
passed a number of acts to improve the condition of the work-
ing classes, while the latter’s political movement marked time
for a while after the defeat of Chartism. Later in the 1860s
social Darwinism played a negative role in reducing the flow,
and lowering the quality of empirical social studies. Whereas
researchers had previously linked crime with poverty and lack
of education, they now sought evidence to prove inherited
degeneracy and biologically conditioned physical and mental
defects. The poor strata of the population, criminals, failures,
and drop-outs were now regarded as the hereditarily worst part
of the human race, and social policy aimed at improving their
condition as harmful, since it helped them survive and conse-
quently degrade the racial purity of the nation.® In that period
empirical statistical studies, among which many were interesting
as regards method, switched to anthropology and eugenics
(the works of Francis Galton and others).

A turn toward reviving social investigations, in particular of
poverty, was noted in the 1880s, and was linked with the name
of the Liverpool employer and shipmaster Charles Booth
(1840-1916). His orientation on empirical study of the facts,
and maximum accuracy in the measurement of poverty was not
the result of academic interests and special scientific training
but of business practice and a liberal outlook that led him to
the ‘problem of problems’, viz., the existence of chronic poverty
in the industrial districts of cities, and of poverty amidst plenty.
He accepted only ‘scientific facts’ and tried to study ‘things as
they were’. When speaking of ‘rational behaviour’ the Protestant
moralist Booth as a rule had ‘economic behaviour’ in mind.

In 1885 Booth became a member of the Royal Statistical
Society, and started on a study of the data of the Census of
1881 (one of the most active periods in the business life of the
United Kingdom) and, later, with the help of workers he hired,
he went on to analyse the censuses from 1801 to 1881 by oc-
cupation, hoping to discover trends that would make it possible

127

not only to understand the future, but also to plan it. He suc-
ceeded in showing that the structure of the population of the
United Kingdom had greatly changed; workers employed in
industry had become twice as many as those engaged in agricul-
ture, whereas they had been equal only 30 years before the
latest census. This research was a good school for Booth for his
future work. He understood the limited, undeveloped character
of the census material for the problems that interested him. In
addition the research helped him make contact with the official
statistical agencies.

During this work Booth had already begun to think about
another investigation that would combine broad coverage of the
population with a profound qualitative study of the relation be-
tween employment and poverty among the working class of
London.

The study was based, as with Le Play’s school in France, on
analysis of family budgets and observance of family life. At first
the researchers were only interested in the ‘poor’; later the
population was divided into eight groups according to the size
and regularity of their incomes; from the ‘lowest class’, which
consisted of unskilled day labourers, vagrants, and criminal ele-
ments, to the ‘upper middle class’, which was defined as the
class that had servants. In the end Booth obtained a detailed,
documented picture of the everyday work and life of the four
million population of London, in which the greater part of the
material was about the poor (four groups) and comparatively
little about the ‘upper class’ and the ‘aristocracy’. Booth’s three-
volume Life and Labour of the People in London was published
in 1889-1891. But the work was continued, and much data ac-
cumulated and analysed, which went into the third edition that
appeared in 1902-03 (in 17 volumes). This edition was divided
into three series: ‘Poverty’, ‘Industry’, and ‘Religious Influ-
ences’.”

The main sources of data for the ‘Poverty’ series was the
188] Census, and information obtained from the police and san-
itary and school inspectors. The duties of the school inspectors
entailed their regularly visiting the houses they were responsible
for; they gathered a wealth of information about families in
which there were children of school age. The inspectors began
gathering material two or three years before a child reached

128

school age, and also registered drop-outs. They also recorded the
occupation of the heads of the families. Many inspectors worked
solely in one area and knew all the people well. Booth later
supplemented this information with data of his personal obser-
vations of certain streets and houses, since he himself lived for
a certain time among workers’ families. In addition, the family
budgets of members of all groups were analysed from a small
sample, except for the ‘lowest’. But the number of budgets
analysed was too small for reliable generalisations.

Among Booth’s other innovatory methods, an interesting one
was his idea of compiling coloured social maps of different areas
of London so as to show graphically the distribution of all the
groups of the population in the city. That is now an ordinary
technique of urban studies. His research showed that up to 58
per cent of the persons belonging to the first four groups of
the ‘poor’ lived in certain streets of the central part of the
East End, while the average of the poor for the whole of Lon-
don was 30.7 per cent.

Although Booth decided to limit himself solely to observa-
tion of the facts as they were, he could not help asking what
were the reasons for poverty and what were the possible mea-
sures to improve the condition of the poor. He analysed the
reasons under three headings: work, habits, and circumstances.

Hoping to prove his conviction of a link between poverty
and working conditions, he turned to an analysis of the oc-
cupations and crafts in London. These studies constituted the
‘Industry’ series. Again the unit was the family, in particular
the head of the family. When determining the number of people
engaged in an industry, he counted both families and individ-
uals. The main source of information was the 1891 Census,
in particular the section on ‘tenants’, which indicated the num-
ber of rooms occupied, and of servants employed, and provided
data on the profession or trade of the head of the family. This
information was supplemented by the materials of industrial
statistics and employers’ unions. A vast number of employers,
trade union leaders, and other people were interviewed as well.

In that series Booth created a new classification of the pop-
ulation according to revised criteria of people’s living condi-
tions, in accordance with which the population was divided
into three classes: ‘lower’, ‘middle’ and ‘upper’. The criteria

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9-1147

were the number of rooms occupied by a family, and the num-
ber of servants employed by it. Sub-groups of the ‘lower’ class
lived, respectively, three or more persons to a room (such
families proved to be 12 per cent in London), two to three to
a room (19 per cent), and one person (23 per cent). In the
middle class there were one to four rooms per person, or one
servant per four persons (the total of such families in London
was around 30 per cent). The rest were upper class.

This classification was not an end in itself, but served as the
basis for comparing the living and working conditions of the
workers in various industries. The industries themselves were
classified according to their primary functions. Booth began
the comparison with a description of the objective facts con-
cerning the whole group of industries under study, and also
with a general statistical description by sex, age, size of family,
and living conditions of those who worked in this group. He
then passed on to a more detailed description, indicating the age
and sex of those working in various trades, the number of
families, and the average size of the families, the birth place
of the head of the family (in London or outside), etc. From
these data he made a comparison between industries, and then
between groups of industries, according to living conditions of
the people of different trades (for example, the size of families,
overcrowding).

In the last volumes of the series attention was paid to general
and theoretical matters, in particular trade and vocational
training, trade unions, localisation and distribution of industry,
standard of living in the capital. The subject of ‘London as a
Centre of Trade and Industry’ was examined. Booth concluded
that universal education should be made the basis for reform in
industry, though he also understood that the rise and fall of
employment in the country also played an important role in
causing poverty. He advocated state aid in the sphere of public
health and education, and non-interference in hiring.

The results of all the series of this immense work were
summed up in the last volume. The study covered the whole of
London. It was divided up into 50 districts according to five
different criteria: percentage of poverty, percentage of over-
crowding, birth rate, mortality, and percentage of early mar-
riages. He also tried to correlate these criteria. The division of

130

the population into ‘upper’, ‘middle’, and ‘lower’ classes was
also correlated with the 50 areas. A combined index was worked
out for comparing the districts, which was obtained by averag-
ing the above-mentioned criteria. In essence Booth was a fore-
runner of ‘urban ecology’, which later became a main theme of
the Chicago sociological school in the USA.

Booth’s work had a great response among the public and
promoted the adoption of a number of statutes on minimum
wages, pensions, and unemployment benefit at the beginning
of the twentieth century. Nevertheless his experience was not
sufficiently comprehended by professional sociologists, and did
not become an organic part of the empirical base of sociology.
As Philip Abrams, the historian of British sociology, noted:

In the general history of Britain Booth is rightly treated as the
more important figure; the scale of his work, its relative originality
and its impact on public opinion make any other judgement impos-
sible. But in the history of social science the case is not so clear.®

Booth had successors in the twentieth century. Seebohm
Rowntree, in his works on urban poverty,’ improved the
method of research, rejecting intermediaries (observers from the
middle class), and turning directly to the workers whose condi-
tion he was studying. In the classification and evaluation of in-
comes Rowntree employed an independent criterion of ‘efficien-
cy’, in addition to the formal criterion of size of income em-
ployed by Booth; this criterion was based on the physiological
and dietary knowledge then available. Having established that
the poverty lay below the minimum level of ‘efficiency’ that
determined capacity to work, he thereby ascertained the sig-
nificance of a wages level insufficient to maintain that efficien-
cy as the cause of poverty. His analysis made it possible to draw
practical conclusions about minimum pay and the system of
social insurance.

Arthur Bowley is famous as a master of investigation by
sampling; he introduced much that was new into the organisa-
tion of such sampling and reduced the labour of carrying out
such studies. '°

Beatrice and Sydney Webb made documented studies of
separate social institutions, supplementing Booth’s principle

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of inductive treatment of empirical data with the principle of
the historical development of the social organisation studied."!

That generation of British empiricists already had the self-
awareness, to some extent, of social scientists. The latter’s
role began to be distinguished from that of the natural scient-
ist, social worker, or administrator. The direct, instrumental
and practical motives and aims of empirical studies were en-
tiched by broader, scientific, cognitive strivings and values.

2. Empirical Social Studies in France

A tradition of statistical social investigations had already be-
come established in France at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, associated with the names of outstanding statesmen
(Colbert, Vauben, and Turgot) and scientists (D’Alembert,
Laplace, Condorcet, and others) of the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. The Revolution strengthened the practical
direction of these studies. France of the end of the eighteenth
century was the centre of empirical study of population prob-
lems. In 1801 the Ministry of the Interior carried out the first
general census so as to elucidate the changes in the numbers,
distribution, and living conditions of the population, as well as
in agriculture and industry, that had taken place since 1789,
the year of the Revolution. During the government of Napoleon
two further censuses were carried out (in 1806 and 1810),
but their programme was only partially realised. Statistical
reports of the different departments and prefectures were often
published in the first years of the century, and the unofficial
Statistical Society (1803-1806) functioned actively.'?

The Napoleonic government, however, was not interested
in broad publicity for results of studies not amenable to control,
and the Statistical Society ceased its work as a result of govern-
ment pressure. In 1810 the government banned publication of
the data of the census, and in 1812 wound up the Statistical
Bureau which coordinated official and private studies. From
then on the gathering of statistical data became the exclusive
right of the government. A full standard census of France was
made again only in 1836.

During the Restoration private social studies once more be-

132

came active, and the publication of official data became more
frequent. Social studies broadened their scope. Not only was
demographic information about the population published but
also data on consumption, incomes, causes of death, and sui-
cides. Attempts were made to classify crimes.

After the Revolution of 1830 the worker question became
more acute and problems of accelerated industrialisation be-
came pressing. The government revived certain statistical ser-
vices and scientific institutions of the pre-Napoleonic period.
At this stage the social-hygiene trend in study of the working
people’s conditions became predominant in France, as in the
United Kingdom.

The classic of this trend was Louis Villermé, a former doctor
in the Napoleonic army. He published many works on questions
of hygiene and mortality among workers, and carried out
major investigations of the state of the prisons. His two-volume
Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers dans les fabri-
ques de coton, de laine et de soie (Picture of the Physical and
Moral State of the Workers in Cotton, Linen, and Silk Mills)
appeared in 1840. The data he published concerned the work-
ers’ working conditions and life: their numbers, demographic
data (births, marriages, number of children in families), average
rates of pay of various categories of textile workers, length of
the working day, sanitary state of premisses, personal hygiene,
diet, family budgets, etc. He also paid much attention to the
exploitation of child labour and problems of illegitimate births.

His studies caused a great public stir. The facts on pay and
family budgets adduced by him clearly witnessed to the poverty
of the workers, while the publicity given to discussion of the
facts of child labour in factories gave rise to attacks on him
by defenders of the established order. The facts on the exploita-
tion of child labour in France were debated in the British Parlia-
ment, which served as an additional stimulus for passage of a
law in 1841 regulating child labour.

Another investigator of social hygiene in the first half of
the nineteenth century was Parent-Duchatelet. Together with
Villermé and other proponents of social reforms, he took part
in the movement to found state health institutions and period-
icals to discuss matters of social hygiene. A journal Annales
d’hygiéne publique et de médicine legale began to appear in

133

France in 1829. His two-volume De Ja prostitution dans la ville
de Paris (1834), and his Hygiéne publique, brought Parent-
Duchatelet European fame. He utilised police documents,
personal observations, interviews, and statistics in his study.
He was not only interested in the demographic characteristics
of prostitutes, their numbers in the city, and the changes in
prostitution in time, but also in features that revealed the life
and psychology of this closed demimonde (the social origin
and birth place of the prostitutes, their social characteristics,
attitude to family, marriage, and religion,) and also the causes
that led them into prostitution. The aim of the study was to
gather objective information for a more successful fight against
this social evil, but he finished it with an admission that prosti-
tution was inevitable, and recommendations on philanthropic,
moral and material aid for repentant prostitutes ineffectual.

The work of the lawyer Andre Guerry made a big contribu-
tion to criminal statistics, especially his Essai sur la statistique
morale de la France (1832) and Statistique morale de l’Angle-
terre comparée avec celle de la France (1864). In the Essai he
established that the number of crimes taking place for a given
number of inhabitants was the same from year to year for one
and the same areas of France, and that each class of crime had
its unchanging distribution by sex, age, and season. For every
100 crimes against the person, for example, 78 were committed
by men and 22 by women. The annual deviation from these
averages over six years was not more than | per cent.

Guerry was unable to explain the regularity in crime statis-
tics. He simply stated the fact and ascribed the regularity to
undiscovered causes that gave rise to crime. In opposition to
the common opinion that the main cause was lack of education
he rejected a direct link between education and crime, meticu-
lously comparing the distribution of education data on the one
hand and types of crime on the other for 85 departments of
France. He drew attention to a number of attendant characteris-
tics of both series—the levels of departments’ industrial devel-
opment—and considered them a decisive variable both for the
standard of education and for crime.

The works of the Franco-Belgian scientist Adolphe Quételet
(1796-1874), one of the major statisticians of the nineteenth
century, have been of special methodological significance for

134

Ee

the development of empirical social studies right down to our
day. While working in many fields of mathematical science
(astronomy, meteorology, etc.), he paid much attention to
propaganda for statistical methods of studying society. Nation-
al statistical societies were organised with his help in the United
Kingdom and France. Quételet was the initiator of the found-
ing of the International Statistical Association for cooperation
in the gathering of social information, and of the convening in
Brussels in 1853 of the first International Statistical Congress.

In his first socio-anthropological studies, like Recherches sur
le penchant au crime aux different ages, Quételet studied the
distribution of peoples’ physical characteristics and the statistics
of crime by probability methods, endeavouring to get as simple
as possible a tabular expression of the quantitative information
needed for practical purposes. The mortality tables he compiled,
for instance, proved useful for insurance societies.

His Physique sociale ou Essai sur le développement des fa-
cultés de l'homme (English translation A Treatise on Man and
the Development of His Faculties), published in 1835, marked
the transition from simple statistical description to deliberate
use of empirical quantitative data to establish patterns of
social life.'> Quételet understood the task of the statistician
quite broadly: statistics was concerned with a state for a certain
period, brought together the elements that pertained to its life,
and studied how to make them comparable and how to combine
them in the most advantageous way so as to identify all the
facts they could reveal.'* His works also marked a transition
from intuitive development of separate methods to systematic
work to unify the technical procedures, terms, and techniques
of statistical analysis.

Quételet’s main contribution to the development of social
research was his discovery of certain statistical laws of social
being.!® By laws of the social world he understood the stability
in time of the average characteristics of people and a given
population: mean physical properties, the constant average
percentage of suicides and crime in society, constant rate of
marriage in various age groups, and so on. In studying graphs
of the distribution of these characteristics of a population,
he drew attention to the point that they were similar to the
classical standard curve of the distribution of observation errors,

135

well studied by mathematicians. That led him to the thought
that, with a sufficiently large number of observations, the dis-
tribution of people’s various properties would obey the law of
standard distribution, and became grounds for the idea of
‘average man’, i.e., of a certain average or mean (usually arith-
metical) from man’s characteristics studied by a given statistical
aggregate. Man, considered abstractly, as a member of the whole
species, and as bearing the average of all the qualities found in
others, he called ‘average man’. He might be taller or stronger
(Quételet said) in one country than in another, just as he might
also be more ingenious, better instructed, or endowed, perhaps,
with a higher morality.!®

Quételet thought of the ‘average man’ asa statistical average
of the main physical and moral qualities of a nation, as a type
or standard, without individual differences, blurring the general
picture. It was meant to serve as the axis of analysis, a reference
point of the fluctuations in the series of statistical indices that
pictured the stable and dynamic states of a society: the average
man was, in a nation, what the centre of gravity was in a body;
it was consideration of that which led to appreciation of all
the phenomena of equilibrium and movement.’” Preserva-
tion of the average man also meant preservation of the type of
society.

Quételet associated the concept of average man, a priori in
essence, with a singular interpretation of averages in general.
He understood the average as a quantity in the calculation of
which everything chance disappeared, all deviations from it were
wiped out, and only the constant and regular remained. In the
social world, according to him, there operated constant causes
(sex, age, occupation, geographical situation, economic and
religious institutions, etc.) and chance ones, i.e., those which
operated indeterminately in any direction. The latter were
mainly the forces of man’s feedback or opposite reaction on
the social system, which ‘disturbed’ its stability. But with a
large enough number of tests, in the language of the theory
of probability, the consequences of these chance causes became
calculable, and revealed an inner necessity. The so-called law of
chance causes asserted that each of man’s characteristics (for
example, the simplest—weight) was normally distributed around
a certain mean in a studied population, and that the greater the

136

number of observations, the more exactly the empirical distribu-
tion coincided with the theoretical probable distribution. From
that point of view the ‘average man’ was a statistical constant
forcing its way through the series of chance circumstances;
it was the type or norm from which other people of the nation
or any statistical aggregate differed more or less solely through
the influence of chance causes.

Quételet regarded statistically average data on the same level
as facts of nature. A conviction that the necessity and regularity
of causal connections in social life were no less than the regular-
ities of phenomena of nature helped him discover stable trends
in series of average quantities and constant correlations between
certain characteristics, which he declared to be social laws.

He traditionally sought substantiation of the statistical
regularities discovered in immutable human nature (such were
his arguments about the inclination to crime). In essence all his
conceptions of ‘average man’ were akin to metaphysical concep-
tions of universal human nature. But in striving to confirm
on the whole the fruitful idea of natural regularities in social
processes he was close to the position of mechanistic determin-
ism. It was this universalist orientation that enabled Quételet
on the one hand to make bold use of averages in all possible
cases and often to obtain interesting results, and on the other
hand to employ them without allowing for the heterogeneity
of the statistical data and without serious sociological substan-
tiation. The average had sense only as the average of a qualita-
tively homogeneous group. The distinguishing of such internal-
ly connected groups was the business of sociological theory.
Quételet’s main concept—‘average man’—was subsequently
rejected by the social sciences as a too obvious simplification
that ignored the qualitative heterogeneity of the social world
and of such big groups as national communities of people.
He himself was not aware that his sociological notions went
beyond the specific mathematical model he had developed.

Main practical results were obtained by Quételet in the
statistics of the ‘physical characteristics’ of man, in a field that
now belongs to demography and medical statistics. He devel-
oped his main techniques of measuring social phenomena
(which have retained their value to this day) in that field, viz.,
analysis of the empirical distribution of certain properties in

137

a group and calculation of averages, the counting of events of
a certain kind in a given period, determination of the mean in
a unit of time, and prediction of their number in the following
period, the counting of events by age groups, and mean norms
for a given group.

The posing of the question of measuring ‘moral qualities’
proved methodologically important for empirical sociology.
The contemporary American specialist on quantitative methods
in sociology, Paul Lazarsfeld, said that Quételet’s moral statis-
tics was a quantitative study of people’s non-physical charac-
teristics. In that sphere direct measurement as in the case of
physical properties was inapplicable; Quételet therefore pro-
posed to evaluate people’s ‘moral qualities’ by the results of
their activity and to measure the activities themselves (by
expenditure of energy, frequency of repetition, and so on).
He did not fully realise the whole complexity and volume of
this problem, in today’s language the problem of the operation-
alisation of sociological concepts. Decision of that problem
would have required, first of all, a radical reconstruction, refine-
ment, and concretisation of the socio-political theories known
to him. He indicated the direction for further quests in this
area, however, and his classification of cases of measurement
practically coincided, in Lazarsfeld’s opinion, with the com-
monest typology of measurable variables in present-day empir-
ical sociology. Quételet’s mode of thought became an organic
part of it.

Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882), a mining engineer by training,
left a considerable mark on the history of empirical social
studies in Europe as the head of a whole school, methodolog-
ist, theorist, and author of a reform programme. Under the
very strong impression of the events of the July Revolution,
he decided to observe society’s life like a naturalist so as to
understand the causes of social revolutions. He took as his main
object of observation the family, as the simplest model and a
cell of any society. All the features of society, and the seeds
of its stability and instability, were inherent, in his conviction,
in the family. The simplicity and accessibility of observation
of the family, provided reliable data for inductive inferences
and did not give ground far abstract speculations. Working as a
major organiser and consultant of mining and metallurgy in

138

~~ -

—-e

various countries, such as Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy,
Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and in Scandinavia, Le
Play studied the life of various families everywhere in detail.
He set himself the task, he wrote of his method, of studying
personally, in all the regions of Europe, more than 300 families
belonging to the most numerous classes of the population. He
devoted at least a week, often a whole month, to compiling
a monograph on each of them. He wanted above all to in-
vestigate in detail the material, intellectual, and moral life of
families belonging to the principal European races.’* As a
result there appeared his Ouvriers européens (1855), which
extended to six volumes in the edition of 1877-79.

Development of the monographic method of observation
and description from an all-round investigation of the family
was the best known contribution of Le Play and his school
to the methodology of empirical social research. The plan of
a family monograph included the following sections: a general
description of the locality, the occupations in the area, and
the family itself; sources of subsistence; way of life; family
history; family budget; and various elements of general social
organisation, i.e., the forms of workers’ contracts with em-
ployers, consideration of the promotion of young workers
in the locality, and detailed information about the technical
and economic conditions of the industry in which the family
worked. The main means of collecting information were person-
al observation and free interviews.

At the centre of each family monograph was a description
of its budget, analysis of which in Le Play’s opinion made it
possible to obtain exact data on the structure and functions
of the family and provided a reliable basis for comparing and
typing families. He tried to use items of the budget (personal
outlays, expenditure on education, etc.) as indices of workers’
previously immeasurable qualities and actions, and even more
broadly of the whole social organisation in which they lived.
He was primarily interested in the family’s spending, habits,
or working conditions that promoted or hindered its rise in the
social hierarchy. A high proportion of expenditure on food in
the budget, for example, allowed him to conclude that the
family had few chances of advancement. Too large a spending
on alcohol and useless diversions and entertainment meant

139

disrespect for religion and education. He even tried to draw
conclusions about class relations from budget indices. Thus he
judged the ‘aggressiveness’ of French sheet-metal workers and
tinsmiths toward higher classes from their high trade union
membership dues.

Such sweeping conclusions, one must stress, were based
primarily on close observation of the family’s life and environ-
ment rather than just on budget data. The budget items figured
as a symptom and measure of certain social relations about
which more general considerations, often not clearly expressed
were built up. It seemed to Le Play that he was building an
objective social science, similar to mineralogy, without any
preconceived theories.'° The obvious departures from the pos-
sibilities of the method, like some of the conclusions I have ad-
duced, were due not so much to its internal shortcomings as to
Le Play’s conservative ideological convictions. The technique
of searching for indicators to measure and predict social rela-
tions has itself been broadly developed in contemporary empir-
ical sociology. Le Play’s ideas gave an impetus to the develop-
ment of complex socio-economic indices. His immediate succes-
sors had already supplemented the indicators of the cash budget
by an analysis of time budgets, etc.

Unlike Quételet, Le Play and his pupils found statistical
generalisations useless. They did not start from them, but from
a thorough examination of the object, in which in their opinion
the whole wealth of social relations was embodied, i.e., from
the family as the main force of social control and socialisation.

Le Play’s pupils and followers, such as Henri de Tourville
and Edmond Demolins, broadened the sphere of application
of the monographic method. Following him, they usually singled
out the habitat of the family as the initial moment in a univer-
sal scheme of analysis of social phenomena known as the
‘nomenclature of social science’. On that point Le Play’s school
supported the doctrine of geographical determinism, claim-
ing that natural conditions determined the type of work,
the character of the family, and ultimately society, and the
outlook for them. In addition there were more than 20 points
in the scheme ranked in order from the simple to the complex.
The plan of a family monograph was supplemented by a descrip-
tion of the neighbourhood, the corporation, the parish, the

140

,

————— a an aa

town, the province, and the state. The wealth of the factors
considered in the ‘nomenclature’ gave Pitirim Sorokin grounds
for classifying Le Play’s school as a ‘synthetic’ one in the history
of sociology. The school, employing its scheme for decades,
carried out numerous studies of the social systems of various
nations.

A result of the study of families was a typology of them.
But this study was not an end in itself for Le Play or his pupils.
Examination of the types of families was a means to under-
standing the historical movement and functioning of society
as a whole, and to forecasting reforms. Le Play distinguished
three types of family: patriarchal—the individual was fully
subordinated to the community and the family acted as a
single, indivisible unit; the stem family” ° —all the family prop-
erty was passed to a single heir, chosen by the father, the
rest of the children migrating (with a chance of returning to
the parental foyer in times of misfortune); the unstable—lack
of sufficient means to pass on to posterity, and a separate
existence of parents and children. For Le Play a highly stable
patriarchal family was an indicator of a conservative backward
society (a historical analogy with the Orient), The stem fa-
mily in his view was an indicator of the most acceptable
social structure, in which tradition and innovation were ba-
lanced. The third type, the unstable family, was character-
istic of the French society contemporaneous with him,
drawn into the process of industrialisation and urbanisa-
tion. Le Play noted with sorrow a trend in the movement
of society from the patriarchal type of family to the
unstable.

Le Play’s political convictions, close to the views of the
traditionalists (especially of de Bonald), had already hardened
before he began his investigations and remained unchanged.
In giving councel concerning the reorganisation of society (Le
Play was one of Napoleon III’s state counsellors, and a senator),
he was more partial to restoration of traditions than to creation
of a new social order, claiming that a strengthening of paternal
authority was needed first and foremost to stabilise society,
which was the task of educational institutions and the national
school. That explains the interest of his pupils in the organisa-
tion of public education in various countries. Le Play’s ideal

14]

in workers’ relations with employers was ‘patronage’, i.e., a
patriarchal trusteeship over workers by small employers who
were in direct contact with them, shared their needs, and wor-
ried about their good. Those views of his subsequently influ-
enced the ideology of fascist corporativism.?!

3. Empirical Social Research in Germany

The constant lag in Germany, connected with the general back-
wardness and disunity of the German states in the first half
of the nineteenth century, and the delay in the beginning of
various social movements compared with the advanced coun-
tries of Europe, had a great impact on the development of
empirical research in that country. Because of that use was
made of the experience and achievements of other countries
in the empirical studies carried out there. In contrast to the
United Kingdom and France, the initiative for such research
in Germany came directly from the powerful bureaucratic
authorities, and also from the universities, which explained
the involvement in it of such leading social scientists as Gustav
von Schmoller, Ferdinand Tonnies, and Max Weber.

As in other countries in the early nineteenth century, Ger-
man Statistics was a mixture of information on geography,
history, demography, the economy, and politico-administrative
matters. But in the middle of the century these studies began
to be differentiated.

An interest in matters of social hygiene and public health
developed from the time of the Revolution of 1848. A prom-
inent figure in this field, and one of the founders of medical
statistics in Germany, was the eminent pathologist Rudolf
Virchow, who proclaimed that ‘if medicine is to fulfil her
great task, then she must enter political and social life’.2? The
German movement for medical reform was based on the ideas of
the French hygienists. Virchow and his associates knew the
work of Quételet. The study of the medical condition of Upper
Silesia undertaken by Virchow in 1848 went far beyond the
framework of a report on the epidemic situation and diseases,
and contained an analysis of the causes of the region’s economic
and cultural backwardness. And his recommendations for

142

preventing future epidemics constituted a radical programme
of social reforms in the spirit of the Revolution of 1848. The
modern historian of German sociology, Anthony Oberschall,
has pointed out that Virchow’s mode of analysis was very close
to the approach employed today to describe underdeveloped
countries.” ?

Research into ‘moral statistics’, demography, and the posi-
tion of the poor section of the population became popular in
Germany in the 1860s and 1870s under the influence of Guerry,
Quételet, and Le Play.

Ernst Engel, originally a mining engineer, and later a profes-
sional statistician, head of the Prussian statistical department,
tried to synthesise the approaches of Le Play and Quételet to
budget studies. His meeting with Le Play had a decisive influ-
ence on the development of his scientific interests. Later he
was associated with Quételet and took part in the First Inter-
national Statistical Congress in 1853. By comparing the data
from the budgets of 199 workers’ families in Belgium obtained
by Quételet’s assistants and the data from budgets contained
in 36 of Le Play’s monographs, Engel found that there was
an identical order of expenditure on vitally important needs
independent of the type of family and size of income: food,
clothing, housing, etc. Furthermore, the lower the level of
income and the poorer the family the higher was the propor-
tion of expenditure on food. This is now known as Engel’s
budget law (1857). He hoped that it, and the anticipated
average values of the items of consumption in each income
group, would make it possible to characterise families by a
numerical index according to their deviation from these
averages.” *

The work of Quételet’s epigone Adolph Wagner, became well
known in demography, criminology, and physical anthropology,
especially in Russia in the 1860s. The title of one of his books
was very characteristic Die Gesetzmdssigkeit in den Scheinbar
willkiirlichen menschlichen Handlungen vom Standpunkte
der Statistik?® (The Regularity of Apparent Chance Events
from the Standpoint of Statistics), was very characteristic.
Wagner saw a regularity even where there was a quite wide
spread of the data, and where it was risky to speak of the exis-
tence of any trend whatever. He studied, in particular, the com-

143

parative statistics of suicides in Europe, trying to discover
their dependence on very diverse factors: weather, religious
affiliation, age, profession, and family position, i.e., almost
all the causes that Durkheim later analysed in connection with
various types of suicide. Unlike Durkheim, however, Wagner had
no theory of his own that would let him to put the data in
an appropriate order, so that he obtained a rather chaotic
picture.

Wilhelm Lexis developed the concept of a mathematical
model of mass behaviour,”® for a long time forgotten but again
introduced into sociology in the 1940s. He developed Quéte-
let’s idea of the quantification of social phenomena, and his
mathematical methods. In that he differed from other German
scholars, in whom Quételet’s social determinism produced
a great impression. Almost all the people working in the field
of empirical social studies in Germany in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century were associated in some way with the
League for Social Policy founded in 1872 by professors, news-
paper men, publishers, civil servants, and employers. Among
its members were the leading German sociologists, historians,
and economists, such as Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, Alfred
Weber, Gustav von Schmoller.27 In the 1880s and 1890s it
became the centre organising and carrying out social research
in Germany.

Over the period 1881 to 1902 investigations were made into
the conditions of farm labour and usury in rural localities, the
position of workers employed in trade, transport, and the mer-
chant navy, and the position of artisans and craftsmen. The
absence of studies of industrial workers was due to reluctance
to aggravate conflict with Bismark’s government, which was
passing laws in the Reichstag aimed against socialists.

The studies themselves did not much resemble today’s.
Their programme was discussed as a preliminary, and the main
points planned on which it was necessary to obtain imforma-
tion. Then these points were formulated as concrete questions.
The document thus compiled was sent out throughout the
country to the most responsible and knowledgeable people
(teachers, landowners, civil servants, pastors and priests, and
others), who returned it filled in, far from always exactly fol-
lowing the organisers’ instructions. The assembled material

144

SS

eee ees

was published, as a rule, without substantial editing. The League
was not much concerned with methodological matters. The
badly formulated, imprecise questions did not enable exact,
comparable answers to be obtained. One of its members, Gott-
lieb Schnapper-Arndt, who published a monograph Zur Metho-
dologie sozialer Enqueten (On the Methodology of Social
Inquiries),”* criticised this practice. But until the appearance
of works of Max Weber, who paid close attention to develop-
ing the methodology of empirical studies, Schnapper-Arndt
was almost the only person who opposed the methodological
unsoundness of the League’s investigations.

Studies of the labour and life of workers again began to
predominate in empirical social investigations in the early
twentieth century. Non-Marxist researchers’ turn to this
theme was due to their desire to find possibilities of managing
large-scale industry without coming into conflict with the
workers’ interests, and so preserving the existing social order.
The tasks were substantially broadened in comparison with
early such studies. The physiological and psychological factors
of factory and farm work, and the socio-political orientation
and intellectual requirements of the workers were studied,
in addition to the material conditions of production and daily
life.

Max Weber defined the tasks of such studies as follows in
1908: it was necessary, on the one hand, to establish what
effect large-scale private industry had on the personal qualities,
vocational fate, and ‘lifestyle’ of its workers, what physical
and mental qualities it developed in them, and how these
qualities were expressed in their personal experience; and it
was necessary, on the other hand, to understand how far the
ethnic, social, cultural origin, traditions, and living conditions
of the workers put a limit to large-scale industry’s capacity to
develop, and on the direction of its development.” ?

Weber’s role as a major organiser of empirical social studies
as well as a classic of non-Marxist sociological theory began to
be recognised only comparatively recently.*° His first empirical
work was Die Verhdltnisse der Landarbeiter in ostelbischen
Deutschland (The Condition of Landworkers in German East
of the Elbe) (1892). His research in the field of industrial soci-
ology retains its value to our day. As a representative of the

145

10-1147

League for Social Policy he carried out an empirical study in
a textile mill in the summer and autumn of 1908, and later
published a methodological introduction to it under the title
of Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit (On the Psycho-
physics of Industrial Work) (1908-09).°? In this study he at-
tempted to establish the dynamics of workers’ occupational
careers, social origin, and life-style, and also to check several
hypotheses about the factors of their productivity. He wanted
to clarify how far the laboratory methods of experimental
psychophysics were applicable to a study carried out in the
real conditions of factory production. He was interested in
the relationship of the worker’s psychophysical state with
labour productivity and the enterprise’s development as a
whole. Although most of the workers refused to take part in
the study, the preparatory stage of the work proved valuable
in itself as regards methodology. The main difference between
Weber’s approach and the present-day one was the absence
in his research of the primary object of study of the industrial
sociology of our day, viz., the group. That was probably con-
nected with his methodological individualism, and his theory
of social action. He relied on the psychophysical characteristics
of industrial work in the context of his sociological scheme,
employing his typology of social actions.

In assessing the place of empirical studies in Weber’s soci-
ology, most contemporary (above all, American) authors come
to the conclusion that his activities as an empirical researcher
and his interest in the method and technique of research cannot
be adequately understood by presenting them as an appendage
to his sociology. Weber sought to make sociology an empirical
science, and therefore those studies were a necessity rather than
a luxury for him.

The broadest study of labour in industry of the early twen-
tieth century was Adolf Levenstein’s study published in 1912
under the title Die Arbeiterfrage (The Labour Question). During
the course of 1907-11 he sent out 8,000 questionnaires to three
categories of workers (miners, steelworkers, and textile workers)
in eight industrial areas, 1,000 to each. At first he distributed
them to his many friends and acquaintances among the workers;
later he asked those from whom he received replies to give the
questionnaire to others. As a result he got quite a high percent-

146

age of returned questionnaires (63 per cent). At first he simply
published the answers of some of those questioned; then he
showed them to professional sociologists, including Weber;
the latter asked him to let some of his colleagues take part in
the further processing of the data. Levenstein refused help, but
listened to the advice to make a quantitative analysis of the
answers.

Levenstein’s questionnaire was badly worked out method-
ologically, but it raised a number of important matters related
to the life of workers: their motivation, satisfaction, claims,
and general attitude to their condition. When analysing the
results obtained, he divided his questionnaire into five parts:
general data (name, age, job, family position, number of child-
ren, income, piece-work or hourly rate of pay); attitude to
work (tiredness, preferred form of pay, thoughts during work);
hopes and desires connected with work; matters connected with
use of free time. Altogether there were 26 open questions in
the questionnaire. Consequently there were serious difficulties
in their processing. But when the typical replies of all three
categories of workers were reckoned up, it proved that interest-
ing new data had been obtained, in spite of the great looseness
and mistakes in the questioning method.°?

At the turn of the century it became obvious that purely
empirical generalisation of the data of concrete studies was
not sufficient. It was also impossible to put up any longer
with the separate existence of ‘sociology’ and empirical social
research, contact between which had been haphazard and rare,
as a rule, in the nineteenth century. Booth’s empirical classifica-
tion of families, for instance, consolidated the traditional British
division of social classes into ‘upper’, ‘middle’, and ‘lower’
in the theory of stratification.

The gulf between the empiric and theory was largely due to
the fact that global historical, evolutionary schemes not amen-
able in principle to testing at the microlevel of the common
type of empirical research, predominated in the sociological
theories of the nineteenth century. One must recall that Comte
and Spencer, whose doctrines became a synonym for speculative
thought for subsequent generations of Western sociologists,
had already called for making sociological theories empirical.
But by empirical they understood concrete historical studies

147
lo*

that could fill in the abstract schematicism of a sociology
which ignored living historical movement. But most of the
empirical social studies of that time were devoted to descrip-
tion of the contemporaneous state of society and its acute
problems (poverty, crime, the condition of the workers, etc.).
In other words, sociological theory was diachronally orient-
ed and empirical research synchronally. In order to bring
about the long-desired meeting of theory and the empiric,
there had to be a radical change in the character of the former
toward greater analyticity and a lowering of its level of generali-
sation.

Up to the end of the nineteenth century social research was
not linked in practice with theoretical sociology. At the end
of the century the position began to change, in the work of
Durkheim, Weber, and Ténnies. But only in the 1920s was the
problem of uniting theoretical and empirical sociology faced
up to, and special development of the methodology and tech-
nique of empirical social studies begun.

Notes

‘See Anthony Oberschall (Ed.). The Establishment of Empirical
Sociology. Studies in Continuity, Discontinuity, and Institutionalization
(Harper & Row, New York, 1972), p 6.

? Ibid., p 10.

> See Stephen Cole. Continuity and Institutionalization in Science:
a Case Study of Failure. In: Anthony Oberschall (Ed.). Op. cit.,
p 110.

* Thomas S. Ashton. Economic and Social Investigations in Man-
chester, 1833-1933 (King, London, 1934).

5 David Elesh. The Manchester Statistical Society: a Case Study of
Discontinuity in the History of Empirical Social Research. In: Anthony
Oberschall (Ed.). Op. cit., pp 31-72.

® B. Lecuier, A. Oberschall. Sociology: the Early History of Social
Research. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 15
(New York, 1968), pp 43-44.

* Charles Booth. Life and Labour of the People in London, 17 vols.
(Macmillan & Co., London, 1902-03).

148

* Philip Abrams. The Origins of British Sociology: 1834-1914 (Univ.
of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1968), p 138.

° B. Seebohm Rowntree. Poverty. A Study of Town Life (Macmillan
& Co., London, 1902).

*° A. L. Bowley and A. R. Runett-Hurst. Livelihood end Po-
verty, A Study in the Economic Conditions of Working Class House-

ee in Northampton, Warrington, Stanley and Reading (London
1915). ;

‘? Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The History of Trade Unionism (Long-
mans, Green & Co., London, 1907),

‘? B. Lecuier and A. Oberschall. Art. cit., pp 44-45.

13 Adolphe Quételet. Physique sociale ou Essai sur le developpement
des facultés de l'homme, 2 Vols. (Muquardt, Brussels, 1869).

14 Thid., VoL 1, pp 101-102.

?5 Adolphe Quételet. Du systéme social et des lois qui le regissent
(Guillaumin, Paris, 1848).

'6 See Adolphe Quételet. Physique sociale, Vol. 1, p 147.

1? Tbid., pp 369-370.

18 Ff Le Play. La réforme sociale en France déduite de l’observa-
tion comparée des peuples européens, Vol. 1 (Dentu, Paris, 1887),
p 68.

'? Tbid., p 70.

20 The concept of famille-souche (stem family), introduced by Le
Play, plays an important role in contemporary historical demography and
the sociology of the family.

21 Walter Goldfrank. Reappraising Le Play. In: Anthony Oberschall
(Ed.). Op. cit., p 133.

?2 Anthony Oberschall. Empirical Social Research in Germany. 1848-
1914 (Mouton & Co., Paris, 1965), p 39.

23 Thid., p 40.

24 Ibid., p 44.

25 Adolph Wagner. Die Gesetzmassigkeit in den Scheinbar willkiir-
lichen menschlichen Handlunger von Standpunkte der Statistik (Geisler,
Hamburg, 1844).

26 Wilhelm Lexis. Zur Theorie der Massenerscheinungen (Freiburg,
1877).

27 Anthony Oberschall. Empirical Social Research in Germany,
pp 21-27.

28 Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt. Methodologie sozialer Enqueten
(Frankfurt a. M., 1888).

29 See Max Weber. Methodologische Einleitung fiir die Erhebungen

149

des Vereins fur Sozialpolitik tiber Auslese und Anpassung (Berufswahlen
und Berufsschicksal) der Arbeiterschaft der geschlossenen Grossindustrie.

In: idem Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Verlag
von J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tiibingen, 1924), p 1.

3° Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Anthony Oberschall. Max Weber and Empi-
tical Social Research. In: American Sociological Review, 1965, 30, 2:
185-199.

3! Max Weber. Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit. In: idem.
Op. cit., pp 61-255.

32 Adolf Levenstein. Die Arbeiterfrage (Rheinhardt, Munich, 1912).

7

THE CRISIS OF EVOLUTIONISM
AND THE ANTIPOSITIVIST TRENDS
IN SOCIOLOGY AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

Igor Kon

1. The Methodological Situation in Social Science
at the Turn of the Century

The end of the nineteenth century was characterised as the end
of the ‘peaceful’ period in the development of capitalism, and

the onset of a new, imperialist phase in it. The sharpening of
the antagonistic contradictions of the capitalist economy, the
strengthening of the class struggle, and the replacement of
‘free’ competition by the dominance of monopoly capital
(and later its conversion into state-monopoly capitalism) all
caused a serious shift in ideology. The complacent expressions
of bourgeois ideologists about their own world as the best of
all worlds, typical of the liberalism of the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, began to sound ironical.

For all its criticisms of the future society, positivist evolu-
tionism was essentially apologetic. As Karl Marx wrote in the
introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy,

What is called historical evolution depends in general on the fact
that the latest form regards earlier ones as stages in the develop-
ment of itself and conceives them always in a one-sided manner,
since only rarely and under quite special conditions is a society
able to adopt a critical attitude towards itself; in this context we

151

are nol of course discussing historical periods which themselves
believe that they are periods of decline.’

The historical optimism of bourgeois conceptions began to
fade little by little after 1848. After 1870 pessimism was
intensified; the future was no longer painted by the most far-
sighted ideologists of the ruling class in such a rosy light as
before. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, for example,
wrote in 1872 that he had a presentiment that might seem quite
mad but that he could not throw it off. The military state
would become a powerful large-scale manufacturer. These
concentrations of people in big workshops could not be left
forever to their needs and greed; a fixed, supervised mass of
misery in uniform would begin and end daily to the roll of
drums—that is what must logically come about.” Not a realm
of freedom awaited humanity, but the absolute despotism of
military authority, outwardly disguised as a republic, and
voluntary submission of the masses to leaders and usurpers.

The feeling of global social crisis being experienced by
capitalist society was clearly expressed by Nietzsche:

Falling apart and, consequently, uncertainty are typical of this
time: there is nothing that can firmly stand on its feet with a
grim self-reliance: men live for tomorrow because the day after
tomorrow is uncertain. Everything on our path is slippery and
dangerous, and the ice still holding us has become so thin; we all
feel the warm and threatening breath of the thaw—where we step,
no one will soon be able to step!*

The collapse of liberal optimism and its principle of Jaissez-
faire was combined with disappointment in organicist ‘structur-
al’ schemes. Sociologists more and more observed capitalism’s
destruction of the traditional ‘communal’ structures, i.e., the
family, neighbourhood, and the craftsmen’s guilds, and in
contrast to the spokesmen of earlier liberalism were alarmed
by these processes.

The re-evaluation of capitalist society’s ideological values was
all the more painful since it was interwoven with a theoretical
and methodological crisis of evolutionism and naturalism.

The idea of development had been assimilated in a very

152

simplified form by bourgeois social studies in the nineteenth
century. Evolution was understood more often than not as
orthogenesis, i.e., movement to a certain initially proposed
goal. As social antagonisms were exposed, this orthogenesis—
whether in the form of the positivist theory of evolution or the
Hegelian historical theodicy (for all their differences they were
essentially close to one another on precisely this point)—was
subjected to sharper and sharper criticism. Historicism proved
in general to be frequently under fire as an idea of the purpose-
fulness of the social process. Positivist evolutionism was justly
reproached for its naturalism, mechanism, and underestimation
of the ‘human’ factor.

This anti-evolutionist tendency first showed itself in the
philosophy of history, in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer,
Jacob Burckhardt, Nicholai Danilevsky, and Friedrich Nie-
tzsche. But anti-evolutionist moods soon penetrated anthro-
pology and ethnography, with which sociology was closely
linked in the nineteenth century.

Positivists, starting from the idea of straight evolutionary
development, suggested that all peoples passed through one
and the same stages, and that culture, political institutions,
etc., were always the same in identical natural and social condi-
tions. That was a fruitful approach, to some extent, as it en-
abled the main lines of development to be distinguished. But
it was based on a dangerous one-sidedness—misunderstanding
of the diversity of the forms and variants of social develop-
ment, and a tendency to fit the facts into too simple a scheme.
The comparative historical method was thus converted into a
means of uncritical collection of facts only to reinforce an
apriori scheme. Hence the constant conflicts and endless dis-
putes between sociologists and historians. The sociologists
accused the historians of a ‘childish passion’ for chronology
and single facts, exaggeration of the role of ‘great men’, and
incomprehension of the patterns and laws of social develop-
ment. The historians, for their part, with no less grounds criti-
cised the sociologists for mechanism, a partiality for arbitrary
generalisations, strained interpretations, and schematism.

The development of anthropology and ethnography refuted
the oversimplified evolutionist schemes and revealed the in-
adequacy of the comparative method. The ethnographic mate-

153

rial clearly showed that the link between a society’s material
life and its culture was by no means unambiguous or unequi-
vocal, that one and the same basis could give rise, according to
the concrete conditions, to a diversity of forms of the super-
structure, and that it was impossible, when speaking of specific
societies, not to allow for facts of the interaction and mutual
influence of peoples.

The diffusion of culture had, of course, been recognised
earlier. The eminent evolutionist ethnologist Edward Tylor
had even written a number of articles on the patterns of the
spread of cultural features. But the cultural borrowings were
also interpreted in the spirit of evolutionism. The position
changed at the turn of the century. Diffusionism gradually
became the leading trend in ethnography; its spokesmen Leo
Frobenius (1873-1938), Fritz Graebner (1877-1934), Grafton
Elliot Smith (1871-1938), and others made processes of the
spread of culture the keystone, and not genesis.

The diffusionist orientation in ethnography and study of
culture yielded very valuable research results. But, being a
natural reaction to the extremes of evolutionism, diffusionism
entailed a danger of loss of the main line of development. The
thesis that culture mainly spread through borrowing excluded
the creation of a generalising genetic theory of culture. The
cultural-historical school in ethnography tried to distinguish
autonomous ‘cultural circles’ or ‘regions’ of sorts. Subsequent-
ly, in opposition both to evolutionism and diffusionism, func-
tionalism was advanced as a guiding principle, according to
which the explanation of each culture was to be sought in the
inner integrity and functional interdependence of the elements
of society’s culture itself, and not in external influences or
stages of evolution.

The eminent American anthropologist, Franz Boas (1858-
1942) stressed that it was impossible to study either the evolu-
tion or the diffusion of the different elements of culture and
art separately, because their significance was determined by
their place in the system of culture as a whole. The culture
and way of life of any society had to be studied not asa partial
case or stage of a single evolutionary process, and not as a
product of more or less chance external influences, but as an
independent concrete whole that should be understood in its

154

internal unity. But, whereas the old evolutionism sinned in
underestimating the specific value of ‘primitive’ cultures,
treating them only as a stage in the development of European
civilisation, now, on the contrary, all cultures and social forms
were declared to be historically of equal value, and study of
their genesis fruitless.

The methodological reorientation that took place in eth-
nology was directly related to sociology, too. The boundaries of
the two disciplines had never been precisely demarcated, especial-
ly as regards the general patterns of culture. In addition there
had always been a certain parallelism in the development of
their general methods. The diffusionist trend in ethnography
was directly intertwined with Tarde’s theory of imitation; he
wrote, in particular, about the ‘diffusion of ideas’; and not
without reason was cited by Boas. Durkheim, too, is rightly
considered a forerunner of functionalism in English ethnology.
The crisis of evolutionism was not a local tendency, but a
general one.

The revolution in physics that occurred at the turn of the
century, which rocked the old metaphysical ideas not only of
the physical world but also of the science itself, and which was
analysed by Lenin in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,
had no less important consequences for the social sciences.

For most of the scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth
century Newtonian physics presented an absolutely correct
picture of the world, in which the reality was entirely reduced
to the arrangement and motion of atoms. Scientists suggested,
starting from the Laplacian mechanistic determinism, that if
the precise arrangement and motion of material particles at any
moment were known, it would be possible to compute the
whole preceding and subsequent evolution of the world from
the laws of mechanics. That primitive mechanism was blown
to smithereens by twentieth-century physics. The revolution
begun in physics naturally did not stop there. The advent of
non-Euclidean geometry and the theory of sets caused a crisis
in mathematics since it became clear that the foundations of
this most exact of sciences were not at all self-evident, as had
been supposed in the ninetheenth century. There were also
serious shifts in chemistry, biology, and other branches of
knowledge.

155

The crisis in physics also shook the sciences of man and
history, psychology, and sociology. The naturalism and evolu-
tionism of positivist sociology rested precisely on Newtonian
physics, although not all scholars were aware of it; the determin-
ism they defended was a typical Laplacian one. The revolution
in physics which indicated the limited nature and inadequacy
of these notions struck a heavy blow to mechanism in social
studies. Even without rejecting use of the terms of physics,
mechanics, and biology when examining social phenomena,
sociology was forced to allow for the changes that were occur-
ring in those branches of knowledge.

The revolution in the natural science drew attention to the
philosophical premisses of scientific knowledge, and brought
out the need to check the basic concepts and methods of
science carefully. The positivists of the nineteenth century
had naively thought that the development of a ‘positive’ science
in itself resolved all social and philosophical problems. At the
turn of the century the main features of the socio-cultural
conception had been moulded that later was called ‘scientism’
by its critics; this conception made an absolute of the role
of science in the system of culture and ideology. Positivism,
from which the scientistic orientation arose, had not only
elevated science to the rank of a universal world outlook, but
had claimed that the methods adopted in the natural sciences
were applicable to any intellectual problem. That was not
only directed against speculative, philosophical ‘metaphysics’
but also against the habitual methods and style of thinking of
the ‘traditional’ humanitarian disciplines.

This orientation, which reflected the rise in the authority
and influence of science, was progressive for a certain time.
But at the end of the nineteenth century philosophers were
already clearly aware of the growing disparity between scientific
and technical progress and the development of spiritual, ethical,
and aesthetic values. In addition, the deepening specialisation
of scientific knowledge, giving rise to a greater and greater
splintering of disciplines, was posing the problem of the integra-
tion of knowledge with new force, and of the restoration of an
integral picture of the world, and of a kind of metascience
(despite the positivist thesis that science was its own philos-
ophy). Finally, and this point is particularly important, interest

156

in the specifics and correlation of natural and humanitarian
sciences had risen sharply at the end of the nineteenth century.

The more rigorous the methods of the exact sciences became
the more they contrasted with the traditional ones of the
humanitarian sciences. Positivists explained this gap exclusive-
ly by the ‘immaturity’ of humanitarian disciplines, which had
not yet reached the level and standard of genuine science. But
there was never any quieting of voices that claimed, in opposi-
tion to that orientation, that the concepts and methods of the
natural sciences could not, by their nature, reflect the complex-
ity of the human world. The crisis of physics promoted a
consolidation and enlivening of the antipositivist orientation,
which had its ideological roots in the romanticists’ idealistic
historicism. Whereas naturalism appraised all forms of human
knowledge, and life itself, by the criteria of empirical science,
the antinaturalist trend in philosophy set itself the aim of criti-
cising science, and of establishing the limits of its effectiveness
and applicability, in the light of certain more general, human,
life, and ethical values.

This ‘critique of science’ was very diverse in its aims and
content. Some writers employed the crisis of physics to prove
the general bankruptcy of the scientific outlook, counterposing
a refurbished irrationalism and fideism to it. Others did not
question the value and effectiveness of science as such, only
opposing scientism, i.e., positivist illusions about science.

2. The Changes in the Philosoply
of the Social Sciences.
Dilthey and Neo-Kantianism

The philosophical foundations of nineteenth-century sociology
were heterogeneous. Apart from positivism, other idealist cur-
rents influenced it as well. And positivism itself was far from
unequivocal in content. To Comte’s holistic-systemic approach
was counterposed Mill’s individual psychological approach.
Taine’s naturalist orientation, which claimed that it was neces-
sary to look at human emotions as a naturalist and a physician’
would, ‘when making classifications and weighing forces’, did
not prevent him thinking, in regard to historical and cultural

157

studies, that man was corporeal, ‘visible’, and important only
insofar as his hidden interior was manifested in the outward
man.°

Nevertheless, sociology was often associated with positivism
and naturalism in the public mind of the nineteenth century,
and the critique of it was developed under the banner of ‘anti-
positivism’ although, as a rule, as the American historian Stuart
Hughes correctly remarked, these critics

used the word ‘positivism’ almost interchangeably with a number
of other philosophical doctrines that they regarded with equal
disfavor—‘materialism’, ‘mechanism’, and ‘naturalism’.®

Justified criticism of vulgar mechanism, naturalism and evolu-
tionism was thus interwoven with idealist reaction aimed
directly or indirectly at historical materialism. It was not by
chance that ‘antinaturalistic’ conceptions were also called neo-
idealist.

Historians of sociology long ago defined the main lines of
this polemic.” Positivists and neoidealists were equally hostile
to the speculative constructs of the traditional ontological
philosophy of history, and stressed the experiential, empirical,
concrete character of social knowledge. But they understood
its nature and functions differently.

Positivism defended the principle of the unity of all scien-
tific knowledge, endeavouring to extend the methods of inves-
tigation of the natural sciences (naturalism) to social phe-
nomena. The antipositivist current, on the contrary, stressed
the specific character of social objects and methods of cogni-
tion, counterposing the social sciences to the natural sciences.
Positivism endeavoured to bring out everywhere the general,
repeated, uniform, scorning the specific, individual, and con-
crete. Neoidealism, following the romantic tradition, centered
on the knowledge of the individual, be it the individual person
or historical period. Positivism tried to reduce the qualitative
diversity of phenomena to a sum total of relatively simple ele-
ments or laws. Neoidealism preferred a synthetic generalisation,
and a typing of various ‘organic wholes’ to element analysis.

Positivism tried to present social life as a more or less auto-
matic interaction of impersonal social factor and forces. Its

158

opponents, on the contrary, looked for a subjective, individual,
personal principle everywhere. The objective determination
of social phenomena did not interest them so much as the
‘inner’ drive, i.e., the sense content of an act, the motives and
conscious orientation of the actor on certain norms or values.

For positivists the leading social science was ‘generalising’
sociology, while ‘descriptive’ history was regarded at best as
an auxiliary discipline. For neoidealists on the contrary, history
presented most interest; sociology was left in the background,
if not declared quite unnecessary.

In opposition to positivist objectivism, neoidealism brought
the problem of the knowing subject to the fore in epistemology;
namely, what it was, in what lay the guarantee of the general
significance of its conclusions; how was cognitive activity relat-
ed to practical, and so on.

Of all the idealist currents involved in the methodological
discussion in the early twentieth century (German and Italian
neo-Hegelianism, Henri Bergson’s intuitivism, Edmund Husserl’s
phenomenology, etc.) Dilthey’s philosophy of life and neo-
Kantianism had the broadest influence on the theory and
practice of the social sciences then.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), whom historians of phi-
losophy often call ‘the Kant of historical knowledge’, radically
counterposed the humanitarian sciences (which he defined as
the sciences of the spirit, Geisteswissenschaften), to the natural
science.

In Dilthey’s view neither positivist naturalism nor the objec-
tive idealist philosophy of history reflected the specific nature
of social life and the social sciences. In his Einleitung in die
Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Science of the
Spirit) he said that an emancipation of the special sciences
began at the end of the Middle Ages, but that those of them
which had society and history as their subject-matter remained
prisoners of metaphysics (right down to the nineteenth cen-
tury). In his day, however, they had fallen into a new subjec-
tion—to the mounting power of natural science—no less oppres-
sive than the old.®

Dilthey did not deny that man was a definite psychophysical
entity that could be broken down only in abstraction, and that
the natural and social sciences in that sense studied one and the

159

same human life. But the natural sciences inverstigated in what
way the course of events affected man’s position, while the
humanities were essentially a science of the spirit that studied
man’s free activity in pursuit of definite aims.

The physical things studied by natural science are known
to us only indirectly, as phenomena. The data of the sciences
of the spirit, on the contrary, are taken from inner experience,
from direct observation of oneself and of other people and the
relations between them. Social facts, he argued, were known
to us from inside, and could be reproduced inside ourselves,
to some extent, from observation of our own states. In under-
standing them, we revived this reproduction of the historical
world with love and hate, and the whole play of our emotions.
Nature was dumb for us. Only the power of human imagination
shed a sparkle of life and inwardness of it. Nature was alien
to man, something external and not internal. Man’s world
was society.”

The primary element of the sciences of the spirit, according
to Dilthey, was direct, inner experience (Erlebnis), in which
man was directly aware and conscious of his existence in the
world. The similarity of the mental structures and spiritual
world of various people made sympathy, fellow-feeling and
affection possible, which in turn was the basis of understanding,
i.e., interpreting of other people’s inner world, motivation,
and the symbols coded in culture. ‘We explain nature, but we
understand spiritual life’, was Dilthey’s main thesis.!°

His theory of understanding was one of the first attemtps
at a theoretical comprehension of the problem of deciphering
and interpreting the meaning and sense (in contrast to the
‘external’ structural determination) of socio-historical activity
and its objectivation. But, since the direct experience on which
any understanding was based was individual, Dilthey considered
the existence of a philosophy of history or of sociology that
claimed to generalise the course of history as a whole to be
both impossible in principle, and illegitimate. ‘Any formula
in which we express the sense of history is only a reflection of
our own resuscitated life feeling... It is impossible to draw any
fruitful truth from such formulas, claiming to express the sense
of history. This is entirely a metaphysical mist’:' !

The philosophy of history tried to abstract the general from

160

the particular and the individual. But that could not be done,
Dilthey stressed, without disrupting the living tissue of historical
reality. The philosophy of history had therefore preserved traces
of its religious origin throughout its development. Even when it
discarded old theological forms (Turgot, Herder, Goethe), its
content still remained religious and metaphysical.

Dilthey evaluated positivist sociology in the same negative
way. He reproached Comte, Mill, and Spencer for terminologic-
al indefiniteness, scientific dogmatism, and gross naturalistic
metaphysics. Sociology claimed to embrace society as a whole,
but in fact whether it was a matter of historical development or
the relations of the components of the social structure, only
specialised, analytical investigations, broken down by discip-
lines (psychology, ethnology, studies of cultural systems and
social institutions), provided fruitful scientific results. Dilthey’s
antinaturalism entailed repudiation of sociology as a science.

Dilthey’s fervour, apart from a general critique of positivist
naturalism, consisted in affirming the subject-orientation,
historicity, and structural integrity of social life. The idea of
subject-orientation meant that the impersonal social structures
and relations that naturalist sociology ranked as independent
‘factors’, were objectivations, products of people’s past and
present activity, that could only be understood in relation to
that activity. Dilthey distinguished the interpretation of culture
and any socio-psychological formations as ‘dynamic integrities’
from the mechanism and eclecticism of contemporaneous
‘psychological theories of society’ that reduced the latter to
a conglomerate of arbitrarily co-subordinated ‘instincts’ or
‘needs’, and culture to a sum total of separate components.
The idea of the historicity of social life meant, in contrast to
abstract evolutionist schemes, a methodological directive for
working out concrete cultural and historical types to express
the specific nature of corresponding epochs.

As the founder of the ‘critical philosophy of history’, Dil-
they had a marked impact on the development of historical
thinking. Eduard Spranger’s structural psychology, Wilhelm
Stern’s personological conception, and to some extent Gestalt
psychology, were a direct development of his ideas in psy-
chology. In sociology his followers were the neo-Kantians of the
Baden School, and Georg Simmel, in whose works Dilthey

161
11-1147

himself saw a partial realisation of his own programme (although
Simmel’s philosophy differed on the whole from his); Dilthey’s
influence was also felt, to a different extent, and in a different
intellectual context, in the Verstehen sociology (‘intuitive or
interpretative understanding’) of Max Weber, and in the theories
of Charles Horton Cooley, Florian Znaniecki, Pitirim Sorokin,
and many others. But it was a contradictory influence.

Because of his initial idealist positions, Dilthey not only
did not eliminate the gulf between the ‘spiritual’ and ‘mater-
ial’ principles in the interpretation of social life, but even
deepened it.

He clearly saw the weak sides of introspective psychology,
was an opponent of relativism, and demonstrated the possibil-
ity of objective knowledge of social life. The sciences of the
spirit, he said, strove to get objective knowledge of their subject-
matter. And man always made objective knowledge of society
his aim. Their general, common premiss was the possibil-
ity of such knowledge.!? But while dissociating himself from
psychological relativism, Dilthey was helpless in face of his-
torical relativism. According to his doctrine, all creations of
the spirit were endlessly transformed: both man himself and his
ideas formed quite individual, inimitable ensembles in any given
period. But social science, like all things created by the mind,
was also part of an ensemble belonging to history.

How then was generally significant social knowledge pos-
sible? In trying to root human and social studies in a cultural,
historical substance rather than in a spiritual, individual one,
Dilthey was unable to overcome the difficulty connected with
the contradiction between his method and the task he posed.
The subjective method of penetrating the ‘spiritual integrity’
of social or cultural phenomena could not guarantee scientific
objectivity of the results of the research.

There was no place in Dilthey’s philosophy for objective
truth. Any system of social knowledge corresponded to a
certain world outlook. But ‘any real world outlook (Weltan-
Schauung) is an intuition that arises from the inner being of
life’)? and the main types of the philosophical outlook, ac-
cording to him, were ‘self-sufficing, undemonstrable, and in-
destructible’.'*

Even sociologists who were receptive to the antinaturalist

162

manner of Dilthey’s philosophy, like Max Weber, had to dis-
sociate themselves from it. The subsequent treatment of Ver-
stehen (understanding) in the social sciences departed more and
more from its intuitive psychological sources, becoming as-
sociated with the problem of interpreting the living sense of
socio-cultural symbols. ‘The difficulty with Verstehen,’ says
one sociological dictionary, ‘is that no one can give a precise
recipe for it.”

Neo-Kantians like Dilthey opposed naturalism and mate-
rialism, stressed the subjective side of cognition, and considered
history a more important and characteristic discipline for the
whole set of social sciences than sociology. But they brought
to the fore logical, methodological problems, the question of
the logical status of historical concepts and methods of shaping
them, in contrast to those of the natural sciences.

The basic theses of the neo-Kantian conception of science
had already been formulated by Wilhelm Windelband in the
introduction to his Geschichte der Philosophie (A History of
Philosophy) (1889), and particularly in his speech Geschichte
und Naturwissenschaft (History and Science) (1894). Consider-
ing the main task of philosophy to be investigation of the
cognitive methods of the special sciences, he came out against
the tendency, characteristic of Dilthey, to dissolve philosophy
in history, and against the ‘universalist tendency’ of positivism,
which ignored the specific nature of the different fields of
knowledge. The traditional division of the experimental sciences
according to their subject-matter into natural and humanitarian
sciences was not successful, in his opinion, because the opposing
of the objects did not coincide with the same opposing of
the means of investigation. It was much more exact to clas-
sify sciences by their method, and by the formal character of
their cognitive aims. The experimental sciences, he argued,
sought, in knowledge of the real world, either the general, in
the form of a Jaw of nature, or the individual, in its historically
conditioned form; on the one hand, they traced the immutable
form of real events and on the other hand, pursued a single,
in itself definite, content. Some were sciences about laws,
others sciences about events; the former taught what always
happened, the latter what once was.'® In the first case we had
nomothetic thinking, and in the other idiographic.

163

In practice it involved opposing the natural and historical
sciences. While the natural sciences signified the triumph of
thought over perception, general concepts had a subordinate
place, on the contrary, in history. The attempts of positivist
sociologists to ‘make a natural science out of history’ yielded
only a few trivial generalities that were acceptable only after
careful analysis of their many exceptions.’ ”

The problem posed by Windelband was developed further
by Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) in his Die Grenzen der natur-
wissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung (The Limits of the Natural-
Scientific Formation of Concepts) (1902).

Rickert, understanding the relativity of the logical counter-
posing of history to science, stressed that his ‘historical logic’
did not set itself the aim of classifying the sciences and did
not claim science to deal only with the general, and history
only with the particular and individual.’® Any scientific
thinking, he argued, had to be thinking in general concepts
in the sense that the elements of judgments and concepts
were general; therefore, if one set history the task of yield-
ing nothing but individual topics and substance, the idea of
a historical science would in fact be a contraidictio in ob-
jecto.'?

The difference between history and natural science, accord-
ing to him, was primarily that general concepts were the aim of
knowledge for that latter, while they were only a necessary
means in history for knowing the individual. The criterion for
the essential in natural science was the recurrent, the general,
while in history, on the contrary, it was the nonrecurrent, the
individual. Therefore the natural-scientific concept brought
out what was common in a host of individual formations, leav-
ing aside what characterised them as regards individuality;
a historical concept, on the contrary, brought out how these
individualities differed from one another.

Since the method and subject-matter of a science were not
rigidly linked, the individualising method could be employed
in principle to nature (geology as the history of the Earth),
and the generalising method to social phenomena (psychology,
sociology). Rickert demonstrated a clear preference, however,
for ‘individualising’ history over ‘generalising’ sociology. While
recognising the logical legitimacy of a natural-science treatment

164

———

of social reality (though it did not, in his opinion, yield signi-
ficant results), he then and there added that sociology not only
did not take the place of history (with which one must agree),
but also told us nothing in general about concrete reality, be-
cause the natural-science treatment of historical reality forcibly
linked together in a moribund commonness that which had
vitality only when separate.

The peculiarity of historical knowledge was that it did not
average phenomena but brought out the essential in them by
relating them to certain generally significant cultural values.
Value, according to Rickert, was the sense that lay ‘above’ or
‘before’ all being.?° Value-relevance was therefore something
quite different from subjective evaluation. In drawing this
dividing line Rickert thought he could thus ensure the objectiv-
ity of socio-historical knowledge. Science, he wrote, was some-
thing more than an arbitrary arrangement of arbitrarily dug-up
facts that had significance only for whoever was entangled in
the values of a certain historical cultural circle?! If historical
development itself did not contain the criteria for its splitting
up, and all historical concepts were formed in relation to certain
values, the claim to unconditional general significance for his-
torical concepts presupposed recognition of unconditionally
general values. Study of the logic of history thus grew into a
metaphysics of values.

The works of the philosophers of the Baden school were
essentially a first attempt to investigate the logical basis of the
social sciences (only Mill, among the positivists, had concerned
himself with that, albeit rather superficially). They brought
out the essential difficulties of applying the historical method
in sociology, and to an even greater extent theoretising in his-
torical research. The disputes caused by Rickert’s book en-
couraged more active study of these matters. In particular
they stimulated the working out of the problem of values both
sociologically (values as a standard component of social activ-
ity) and epistemologically (‘relation to value’ and the criteria
for scientific objectivity). Rickert’s theory of historical concepts
formed in respect of a certain value, in contrast to statistical
generalisations, influenced the development of typological
procedures in sociology. On the philosophical plane the Baden
school, together with Dilthey and Husserl, laid the foundations

165

a

of the future ‘humanist’ or phenomenological orientation of
sociology.

But the influence of neo-Kantianism on sociology was pre-
dominantly indirect (through Max Weber and German cultu-
rological conceptions).

The neo-Kantians claimed, quite without grounds, to ‘over-
come’ the dialectical-materialist theory of reflection. As Rickert
wrote, if science were given the task of exactly reproducing
reality only the weakness of the concept would be discovered,
since the sole consistent conclusion of a doctrine about science
in which the theory of reflection predominated would be abso-
lute scepticism.?* But the Marxian theory of reflection does not
require the concept to coincide directly with the object and,
moreover, reflect it in all its diversity. Infinite reality is em-
braced only by the infinite historical process of cognition and
knowing. Rickert, on the contrary, having metaphysically isolat-
ed the separate concept, compared its scanty, abstract content
with the boundless diversity of reality, and concluded that
cognition did not reflect objective reality. That gave his theory
features of a fundamental agnosticism, for which Marxists, in
particular Georgi Plekhanov, criticised him back at the begin-
ning of this century?* The neo-Kantians essentially consolidat-
ed this rift between history and sociology, which had arisen
already, in practice, in the middle of the nineteenth century,
and the negative consequences of which are still felt (at one
pole, descriptive history, which scorns conceptual definiteness
and many general scientific methods of research, and at the
other sociology, relying on formal definitions that do not cor-
respond to any definite socio-historical reality).

3. The Position of Sociology

How were all these philosophical, methodological problems
reflected in sociology itself? Its position in the system of social
science at the turn of the century was rather ambiguous. On the
one hand it was rapidly developing; the themes of empirical
social studies were being broadened, and special journals,
societies, and university chairs were making their appearance.

166

|

On the other hand, spokesmen of the traditional social sciences
continued to look askance at sociology, while confusion reigned
in sociological theory itself.

In Great Britain the London Sociological Society, founded
in 1903 as a centre of sociology (its first president was the well-
known lawyer James Bryce), began to publish The Sociological
Review in 1908. But the Society had no definite programme of
any sort. The first editor of The Sociological Review, Leonard
Hobhouse (1864-1929), wrote in a leading article that

not only are there still many who deny the bare existence of Soci-
ology, but, what is more serious, among Sociologists there are still
many deep divergences of view as to the nature and province of the
enquiries which they professedly pursue in common.? *

In 1907 the first chair of sociology in the United Kingdom
was founded in the University of London, funded by a private
benefactor who wanted ‘to aid in establishing the academic
status of Sociology in the Universities’.?5 Hobhouse was the
first holder of the chair. In Oxford and Cambridge, however,
the road of sociology was closed, and British sociology had still,
for a long time, to develop within anthropology and ethno-
graphy.

In France Le Play’s followers used the term ‘sociology’ only
for the works of pupils of Comte and called their own studies
‘social science’. The institutionalisation of sociology as a univer-
sity discipline began there at the very end of the nineteenth
century under the influence of Durkheim, who, in 1896, be-
came the first professor of ‘social science’ in France, in Bor-
deaux University. After moving to Paris, Durkheim read a
course in pedagogy, religion, morals, and the family (‘the
science of education’).

The state of affairs was even worse in Germany. The phi-
losophy faculties, in which all the human and social studies
were concentrated, did not want to have anything to do with
empirical research. As Anthony Oberschall has put it, ‘empirical
social research was thus important to the German professor
in his capacity as a citizen but not in his disciplinary role’.?°
The philosophers’ ‘traditional’ professional hostility to soci-
ology was deepened by theoretical and ideological divergences,

167

since sociology was associated among conservative scholars
with positivism, the socialist trend, and foreign influences.
This hostility spread even to theoretical sociology. In a letter
to Ward, Gumplowicz complained bitterly that German pro-
fessors did not want to know anything about sociology, and
that the library of Graz University did not even subscribe to
the American Journal of Sociology. Ferdinand Ténnies wrote
in 1912 that ‘everyone knows ... that sociology is not accepted
at German universities, even as a side table of philosophy’.*”
It also had no support from the bureaucracy. Therefore, in
spite of the founding of the German Sociological Society in
1909, headed by Tonnies, the institutionalisation of sociology
was still a long way off.

The situation in the USA was quite different. The absence
of a rigid system of higher education, the existence of funds,
rivalry between the universities, the influence of pragmatism
and Spencerism, and a broad movement for social reforms
provided opportunities there that did not exist in other coun-
tries. The first course bearing the name of sociology had already
been read by Sumner at Yale University in 1876. In 1893 Small
opened the first chair and sociological specialisation in Chicago.

By 1901, 169 American universities and colleges were al-
ready offering their students courses in sociology. In 1905,
under the presidency of Ward, the American Sociological Soci-
ety arose. The American Journal of Sociology, founded ten
years earlier, became its official organ. But it is not by chance
that Oberschall calls the early American sociology ‘more a
“movement” than an intellectual discipline’.?®

The founding fathers of American sociology were not profes-
sional researchers. More often than not they were clergymen
(Sumner, Small, Vincent) and journalists (Giddings and Park).
Some were scholars in other specialities (Ward, for example, was
a palaeobotanist). As Small wrote in 1924, most of the works
published in the USA as ‘sociological’ were simply ‘old fashioned
opinionativeness under a new-fangled name’.”?

When Ward was writing his Dynamic Sociology he had no
idea that anyone else was working in this field. Small recalled
that, when Sumner was elected president of the American
Sociological Society in 1907, ‘he was not within my field of
vision as even nominally a sociologist... He remained the

168

American echo of laissez faire as represented in England by
Spencer’.?° Sumner, in turn, in the words of one of his pupils,
did not use the term ‘sociology’ because ‘he detested with fury
most of the work done under that name, most of its tendencies,
and nearly all who taught it’.?! Right up to his death he con-
sidered himself a professor of ‘political and social science’.

As a result a paradoxical situation took shape. Sociology
was developing. Along with national centres, international ones
also appeared. The first congress of the International Institute
of Sociology was held in Paris in 1894 under the chairmanship
of René Worms, which formalised the foundation of this institu-
tion, whose members included Schaffle, Fouillée, Lilienfeld,
Kovalevsky, Giddings, Schmoller, Gumplowicz, Tarde, Ténnies,
Simmel, Wundt, and Small. The Révue internationale de socio-
logie, founded the year before, became the printed organ of the
Institute. Another international centre of attraction was the
journal L’Année sociologique founded by Durkheim in 1896.

Although sociological journals and societies promoted profes-
sionalisation of sociology, and strengthened international ex-
change of ideas, the framework of this exchange remained quite
limited. Only 20 per cent of the 258 American sociologists
polled by Bernard in 1927 mentioned even one non-American
scholar among authors who had essentially influenced their
intellectual outlook.*? Exchange of information was more
intensive in Europe, but even there, unacceptable ideas were
glossed over by the common form of polemic against them.

Doubt in the subject-matter and methods of their science
was not confined to sociologists alone in the early twentieth
century, but the position of sociology was particularly shaky.
The eminent mathematician Henri Poincaré aptly said that
sociology was a science that produced a new methodology every
year but never produced any results. *

All that could not help affecting the views of the generation
of sociologists whose major representatives were Simmel (1858-
1918), Tonnies (1855-1936), Durkheim (1858-1917), Weber
(1864-1920), and Pareto (1848-1923).

What did they have in common?

Ideologically, a sense of the deep crisis of capitalist society,
and a feeling of disappointment with it were inherent in all of
them.?4 Tonnies’ ideas of the break-up of communal ties, Sim-

169

mel’s of the crisis of culture, Durkheim’s of anomy, Weber’s
of charisma and bureaucracy, Pareto’s of the irrational founda-
tions of social behaviour were permeated with burning alarm
about social problems they could see no means of solving.

A typical orientation of science and a striving for objectivity
were methodologically typical of them (Durkheim’s method-
ological objectivism, which called for examination of social
facts ‘as things’; Weber’s demand for science to be separated
from values; Pareto’s ‘logico-experimental method’). At the
same time many of them understood that a simple copying of
the methods of the natural sciences was not sufficient to make
sociology an independent branch of knowledge.

Almost all the sociologists of that generation stressed the
need for sociology’s definite emancipation from philosophy,
and its experimental, empirical character. At the same time,
important philosophical problems were at the focus of their
attention, ones like the nature of social reality, the relation
of the individual and society, the specific epistemological nature
of socio-historical knowledge, the criteria of the truth of social
theories, the relation of science and world outlook, etc. In de-
fining the special character of sociology as a science, method-
ological differences were given no less importance, and some-
times more, than the differences of subject-matter (a direct
influence of neo-Kantianism).

In perceiving the crisis of capitalist society primarily as one
of its system of values, sociologists paid most attention to study
of normative ideas, ideology, culture, and, especially, religion
(the sociology of religion of Durkheim and Weber, Pareto’s
theory of ideology, Durkheim’s concept of collective notions,
etc.).

The historical, evolutionary approach to phenomena yielded
place to a structural, analytical one, and its authors tried not
only to illustrate and supplement their general theoretical
constructs but also to check them by empirical studies (Durk-
heim’s Suicide, and his school’s comparative ethnological
studies, Weber’s works on the comparative sociology of reli-
gion, Tonnies’ empirical studies, etc.).

And, finally, the confrontation of bourgeois sociology with
Marxism became broader and sharper.

170

Notes

’ Karl Marx. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), p 211.

? Jacob Burckhardt. Briefe (Dieterich’schen Verlagsbuchhandlung,
Leipzig, 1929), p 364.

3 Friedrich Nietzsche. Der Wille zur Macht (Alfred Kroner Verlag,
Stuttgart, 1959), p 50.

“H. Taine. Histoire de la littérature Anglaise, Vol. I (Hachette & Cie.,
Paris, 1873), p XLVI.

5 Ibid., p X.

6° H. Stuart Hughes. Consciousness and Society. The Reorientation
of European Social Thought. 1890-1930 (Macgibbon & Kee, London,
1959), pp 37-38.

7 Talcott Parsons. The Structure of Social Action (The Free Press,
Glencoe, Lll., 1949).

® See Wilhelm Dilthey. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. In:
Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1 (third edition) (Verlag von Teubner, Leip-
zig, 1957), p XV.

> Ibid., p 36.

1° Wilhelm Dilthey. Ideen ber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde
Psychologie. In: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 5 (Teubner Verlagsgesell-
schaft, Stuttgart, 1957), p 144.

11 Wilhelm Dilthey. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, Op. cit.,
Vol. 1, pp 97, 112.

12 Wilhelm Dilthey. Der aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den
Geisteswissenschaften. In: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 7 (Teubner Ver-
lagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart, 1958), pp 313, 314.

13 Cited by I. S. Kon. Die Geschichtsphilosophie des 20 Jahrhunderts.
Kritischer Abriss, Vol. 1 (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1964), p 96.

14 Ibid.

18 T, F. Hoult. Dictionary of Modern Sociology (Littlefield, Adams &
Co., Totowa, N.J., 1969), p 346.

16 See Wilhelm Windelband. Praludien, VoL 2 (Verlag von J.C.B.
Mohr, Tubingen, 1924), p 14S.

17 Ibid., p 155.

18 See: Heinrich Rickert. Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen
Begriffsbildung. Eine logische Einleitung in die historischen Wissenschaft-
en (Verlag von J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tubingen, 1929), p XV.

19 Ibid., p 305.

20 See: Heinrich Rickert. Zwei Wege der Erkenntnistheorie. Trans-
scendentalpsychologie une Transscendentallogik (C. A. Kaemmerer & Co.,
Halle, 1909), p 37.

71 See Heinrich Rickert. Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft
(Verlag von J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tiibingen, 1926), p 140.

22 Tbid., p 32.

23 G.V. Plekhanov. On Mr. H. Rickert’s Book In: Selected Philo-
sophical Works, Vol. 3 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976), pp 481-86.

24 Philip Abrams. The Origins of British Sociology: 1834-1914
(Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1968), p 147.

25 Tbid., p 130.

?6 Anthony Oberschall (Ed.). The Establishment of Empirical Soci-
ology. Studies in Continuity. Discontinuity, and Institutionalization
(Harper & Row, New York, 1972), pp 10-11.

77 Ferdinand Tonnies. On Sociology: Pure, Applied, and Empirical.
Selected Writings (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1971), pp 24-25.

28 Anthony Oberschall (Ed.). Op. cit., p 189.

29 Ibid., p 219.
3 Ibid.,, p 222.
31 Ibid.

3? Levine, Donald N. Carter, Ellwood B. Gorman, Eleonor Miller.
Simmel’s Influence on American Sociology. In: American Journal of
Sociology, 1976, 81, 4: 813.

?3 Edward Shils. The Calling of Sociology. In: Theories of Society.
Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, Vol. 2 (The Free Press of
Glencoe, New York, 1961), p 1407.

34 Reinhard Bendix and Guenther Roth. Scholarship and Partisan-
ship: Essays on Max Weber (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, Cal.,
1970).

8

FERDINAND TONNIES’ SOCIOLOGICAL
CONCEPTION

Leonid Ionin

Ténnies was born in 1855 in the town of Oldenvorg in the
Duchy of Schleswig in a well-off peasant family. In 1872 he
matriculated in the University of Strasbourg and completed his
university education in Tubingen in 1875 with a dissertation on
classical philology.

Subsequently his interests embraced a broad field of prob-
lems of the most varied social and scientific disciplines. In the
1880s and 1890s they were devoted to study of the social phi-
losophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their result
was a book on Hobbes published in 1896, and subsequently re-
printed several times, and a number of papers on Leibnitz, Spi-
noza, Nietzsche, Spencer, Marx, and others. These studies were
continued even later. His book Marx. Leben und Lehre (Marx.
Life and Work) was published in 1921.

His study of Hobbes encouraged Ténnies to devote himself
wholly to the philosophy of history and the philosophy of law.
His own conception was formulated in Gemeinschaft und Ge-
sellschaft (Community and Association), written in 1881, with
the sub-title ‘A Theorem of the Philosophy of Culture’, and
republished many times later in revised and extended form. This
work constituted the basis of Ténnies’ sociological conception.

In the early 1880s, Tonnies also showed an interest in social
statistics, in particular in the problems of crime, poverty, sui-
cide, etc. In addition to his empirical work, he was also regularly
engaged in theoretical work in the field of sociology: Die Sitte
(Morals) (1909), Kritik der Offentlichen Meinung (Critique of

173

Public Opinion) (1922), Das Eigentum (Property) (1926), and
Einfiihrung in die Soziologie (Introduction to Sociology) (1935).

In spite of his broad theoretical, empirical, and publicistic
activity, Ténnies was recognised in academic circles quite late.
Only in 1913 did he become a professor at the University of
Kiel. In 1910, he made the introductory speech at the meeting
in Frankfort that founded the German Sociological Society.
In 1921 he was elected president of the Society, and held that
post until the Nazis dissolved it in 1933.

Being disposed toward Social-Democratic politics Tonnies
supported the Weimar Republic. He opposed National Sociaf-
ism, warning the public of the danger of a ‘decline into bar-
barism’ and was attacked by Nazi demagogues.

He died in Kiel in 1936.

Tonnies’ posing of the main problem of sociology followed
from his study of the main contradiction in the development
of socio-philosophical thought in the eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries: viz., the contradiction of the rationalist and
historical approaches to the origin and existence of the state,
law, and social institutions.

Recognition of man’s natural rights was characteristic of the
proponents of the rationalist mode of thinking, who based
themselves on the ideas of the Enlightenment, and consequent-
ly, also, recognition of the people’s absolute power and inalien-
able right to make rational laws and a rational social system
corresponding to human nature.

Supporters of the historical approach, which is most clearly
expressed in the works of the historical school of philosophy
and national economy, for example, stressed the importance of
the traditional standards and principles of human intercourse
and, correspondingly, the need for the existence of historically
established forms of state and legal regulation of social life.

Tonnies set himself the aim of linking together the rational-
ist and historical outlooks, and of combining the advantages of
the rationalist scientific method with historical view of the
social world. His sources were the works of Friedrich von Savig-
ny, the founder of the historical school of jurispudence (prima-
tily the ideas formulated by Savigny in his little, but very fa-
mous book Vom Beruf unserer Zeit fiir Gesetzgebung und
Rechtswissenschaft (On the Vocation of Our Times for Legisla-

174

tion and Jurisprudence), Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (in which
Savigny’s ideas were reflected and in which—in the opposition
of statutes and contract—Tonnies found the conceptual basis
of developing pairs of antinomic concepts ultimately defining
the whole content of his own sociological conception), and the
works of Lewis Morgan, Johann Jacob Bachofen, and other
ethnographers, historians, and jurists of the time.

The historical school of the national economy predominated
in the economic thought of Germany in the nineteenth century.
A dispute between Schmoller’s historical school and Karl Men-
ger, the mathematician, philosopher, and economist, which de-
veloped at the end of the century, led to a weakening of the
influence of historism in favour of the deductive methods
stressed by Menger, and consequently in favour of rational,
conceptual thinking in general. Tonnies discovered the basis
of the rational approach to social life in the heritage of seven-
teenth-century European philosophy, above all in the rationalist
philosophy of Hobbes and Spinoza.

In one of his first historical philosophical works, on Hobbes,
Tonnies formulated the theoretical content of the concepts that
subsequently underlay his sociological theory. The most import-
ant paragraph in that work ( the concluding one), from the
angle of the development of his ideas, read more or less as fol-
lows: some of Hobbes’ successors sought support in him for the
conception of the absolute sovereignty of the communal will.
In the historical context of the time that corresponded to the
phenomenon of unlimited monarchy. Others, starting from op-
timistic notions of the nature of man, rejected even this new
authority which overshadowed everything else; they did not
consider the community per se to be necessary at all, suggest-
ing that the greatest possible happiness of mankind could be at-
tained through a pure society and a social state, i.e., through
individuals” equitable bilateral, binding, and terminable relations
with one another. The first successful representative of the first
idea was Locke, who was victorious principally through his ex-
cursion into the young science of political economy. Its real
counterpart lay in the external form of liberal constitutional-
ism.!

Tonnies consistently developed this fundamental! counterpos-
ing of the two types of society in a small work Gemeinschaft

175

und Gesellschaft with the subtitle ‘The Theorem of the Phi-
losophy of Culture’, written like the article cited above, in 1881,
a work that subsequently brought him world fame. Its basic idea
was a counterposing of the concepts of community, or com-
mon, joint (gemeinschaftliche) relations and connections, and
of social (gesellschaftliche) relations. The first kind were rooted
in emotions, attachments, and mental inclinations, and preserved
their own self-identification both consciously, by virtue of
tradition, and unconsciously because of emotional ties and
through the unifying influence of a common language. Tonnies
said he distinguished three types of communal relations: (1)
those of descent (which were primarily taken as natural or
blood-relationships); (2) ‘neighbourhood’ relations which were
characterised by living together, and were inherent in marital
and family relations (in the narrow sense); but the concept had
a broader sense; (3) ‘friendship’ relations, which were based on
the awareness of spiritual nearness and kinship, since that aware-
ness postulated or rested on some kind of togetherness (it ac-
quired special social significance when it was realised as a com-
mon religious affiliation, or as a community ).?

The relations of the second kind had a different character.
The principle and basis of social relations was rational exchange,
a change in the ownership of things, so that they had a material
nature and were characterised, by virtue of the very nature of
exchange, by the parties’ oppositely directed aspirations and
strivings. These relations were based in part on the communal
type described above, but could also exist between individuals
who were separate and unknown to one another, even between
enemies, because of the conscious decision of the parties involved
in them. Various kinds of groups, collectives, and even com-
munities and states, considered formally as ‘persons’, could en-
ter into this type of relation as individuals. The character of all
such relations and connections, Tonnies argued, consisted in the
awareness of the utility and value one person had, might have,
or could have for another, and which the latter found, per-
ceived, and was aware of. Such social relations, consequently,
had a rational structure.’

These two types of relations and connections—communal
and social—not only characterised people’s relations with one
another but also described a person’s relation to society. In a

176

community the social whole logically preceded the parts; in a
society, on the contrary, the social whole was formed of an ag-
gregate of parts. The difference between community and asso-
ciation or society was the difference between the organic and
mechanical ties of the parts that constituted the social whole.

Two types of will, described by Ténnies as Wesenwille and
Kurwille (originally as Willkwur, discretion), were the founda-
tion of the two types of the organisation of social life. Wesen-
wille was the will of the essence, i.e., the will of the whole, in
a certain sense, that determined any, however insignificant,
aspect of social life. Kurwille signified another type of the ac-
tion of the integrating factor, a weakening of the social will,
and its division into a host of partial, sovereign wills mechani-
cally combined in the whole of social life.

The paramount importance that Tonnies attached to the con-
cept of will was grounds for most investigators to assign his idea
to the psychological trend in sociology. But that is not justi-
fied. Ténnies hardly understood will as a purely psychological
factor. Although he consistently wrote that there was no hu-
man conduct without will, it was a very abstract concept in his
understanding that lacked any direct psychological sense.

‘Since all mental! action involves thinking,’ he wrote, ‘I dis-
tinguish between the will, which includes the thinking, and the
thinking which embraces the will.’* Elsewhere he expressed
it even more definitely, saying that will was determined in its
human quality by the strength of human thought.’ The Latin
epigraph from Spinoza that he put at the head of a section of
his main work—Voluntas atque intellectus unum et idem sunt
(will and intellect are one and the same)— helps us explain the
origin, and consequently the rational kernel, of his notion of
human will.

The rationalist character of Ténnies’ substantiation of soci-
ology came out in his treatment of the social behaviour of indi-
viduals. When analysing social behaviour he employed the typol-
ogy introduced by Max Weber, by which the following types
of rational behaviour were distinguished: goal-oriented, value-
oriented, affective or emotional, and traditional.® In Tonnies’
opinion Kiirwille was realised in the first of these forms, while
Wesenwille was realised in the other three (only one of which
presupposed the psychological factor as determinant). The

177

rational work of reason was thus the criterion for distinguish-
ing two types of will and for linking the two types of social
structure with them. Underlying Tonnies’ analysis of social be-
haviour was an analysis of the relationship of means and ends,
i.e., an analysis of rationality, whereas the nature of the social
was determined through individuals’ ‘self-awareness’ of them-
selves and of others as members of society.

Since Ténnies in fact identified will and reason (following
Spinoza), this meant that for him the motivation of joint social
life, social interaction and ‘socialising’ (like the formation of
the state with Hobbes) did not stem from the tradition hal-
lowed by the Church, as claimed by the political philosophy of
reactionary romanticism (and not from God as Hobbes’ op-
ponents, the scholastics, had claimed) but from reason.

Tonnies’ doctrine of types of will clearly showed his opposi-
tion to historising romanticism, and his aspiration to give a
rationalist explanation of the nature of social life.

It was not by chance that he gave his main work the sub-ti-
tle of ‘A Theorem of the Philosophy of Culture’ (in the first
edition). The concepts ‘community’ and ‘society’ developed in
it became the first step toward developing a formal and, in a
certain sense, ‘geometricised’ conception of sociology, that
he himself called pure sociology (later, it began to be treat-
ed as formal sociology in the works of historians of social
thought, while Tonnies himself was considered the founder
of the corresponding ‘school’).

In his historico-philosophical works Ténnies analysed in de-
tail the notions developed by seventeenth-century thinkers
about the features and peculiarities of social knowledge. He con-
sidered, for instance, that, according to Hobbes, a pure, i.e., a
priori, demonstrative science was possible: (a) about mental
things and abstract objects (geometry); (b) about ‘political bo-
dies’, i.e., about the principles of social institutions produced
from human thought that could not be perceived sensually, but
the type of which was constructed. Precisely the same principle
underlay T6nnies’ own scientific teaching. Just as Hobbes and
Spinoza were convinced of the boundless possibilities of the
move geometrico, so TOnnies, too, suggested that a formal de-
duction of various forms of social life, unaffected by the in-
terests and inclinations of individuals and the selfishness and

178

= =

aims of groups and classes, would help achieve universal social
knowledge of general significance. The word ‘theorem’ there-
fore also appeared in his work as affirmation of the rights of
conceptual, constructive thinking in opposition to the growing
strength of the trends of empiricism and irrationalism.

A paramount requirement of the methods of rationalist
methodology was to objectify social phenomena in the sense of
ensuring a logically rigorous investigation, and achieving knowl-
edge of general significance. The tools of reification were ab-
straction, idealisation, and the constructing of ideal types. The
types obtained were not erected into absolutes, and reality was
not ascribed to them; on the contrary, the types themselves—
conceptual ‘yardsticks’—were applied to the living reality of so-
cial life, opening up opportunities for a proper sociological
study of it. That point is particularly important, because, in
stressing the impossibility of identifying constructed concepts
and empirical reality, Tonnies was trying to put sociology on
scientific lines, and was breaking with the age-old tradition of
arbitrary philosophico-historical speculation.

Abstraction was thus made the basic principle of sociology.
This approach, clearly, was aimed against the historical school
and the subjective empiricism of the philosophy of life. Clear-
ly, too, a rehabilitation of rationalism of this kind could lead to
rehabilitation of the Enlightenment’s idea of natural law and,
consequently, to an ignoring of history and development.

Tonnies, however, managed to avoid that danger. The point
was that the initial idealisation on which his sociology was based
included two abstract concepts rather than one (as, for example,
with Hobbes or Locke, or other thinkers of the Enlightenment).
Underlying his sociological thinking was the principle of concep-
tual antinomy: since any concrete manifestation of social will
was simultaneously a phenomenon of will and of reason or intel-
lect, so, too, any social formation simultaneously contained fea-
tures of both community and society.

Community and society thus became the main criterion for
the classification of social forms. Tonnies strove in general to
work out a developed, ordered system of such criteria The so-
cial entities or forms of social life were divided into three types:
(1) social relations, (2) groups, and (3) corporations or associa-
tions. Social relations existed not only when they were felt or

179

realised as such by the individuals involved in them, but also
when their necessity was realised; they existed to the extent the
mutual rights and obligations of the parties arose from them. In
other words, social relations were ones that had an objective
character.

The aggregate of social relations between more than two
parties was a ‘social circle’, which was a transition stage from
relations to a group. A group was formed when the association
of individuals was consciously regarded by them as necessary
in order to attain some goal. Furthermore, any social form
was called a corporation or association when it possessed
internal organisation, i.e., when certain individuals performed
certain functions within it, their acts being ones of the corpora-
tion.

The division into relations, groups, and associations overlaps
with the classification of human relations by the criterion of
‘dominance-partnership’. Only then are the types obtained
through classification divided by the more general criterion into
‘communal’ and ‘social’.

Tonnies” classification of social norms had exactly the same
complex character; they were divided into (1) norms of social
order, (2) legal norms, and (3) moral standards. The first were
an aggregate of norms of the most general order based primarily
on a general agreement or convention. Norms of order were
determined by the normative strength of facts. Law, according
to him, was created from customs or by way of formal legisla-
tion. Morality was established by religion or public opinion. All
these standard norms are divided in turn into ‘communal’ and
‘social’. The differences have an ‘ideal-typical’ or analytical
character. They are not encountered in pure form in reality. The
normative systems of all social forms, without exception, are
composed of aggregates of norms, order, law, and morals.

Ténnies’ typology of social values is less complicated.

All these detailed, ramified typological constructs would
have an absolutely extra-historical and abstract character if
literally each of the forms distinguished were not constantly
divided into communal and social manifestations. The applica-
tion of this principle to the analysis of concrete social phenome-
na made it possible to catch and conceptually reflect phenome-
na of historical development; and that was the applied signifi-

180

cance of these classifications in general and of the concepts of
community and society in particular.

Tonnies called analysis of social phenomena from the stand-
point of their development applied sociology. Some of his fol-
lowers treated applied sociology as a scientific philosophy of
history. He himself originally defined its aims much more mod-
estly, saying that while pure sociology was limited to compre-
hending and describing reality statically, in a state of rest, ap-
plied sociology dealt with it dynamically, ie., regarded it in
motion.’ For Ténnies the principle of conceptual antinomy
became the method of applied sociology. The dialectical interac-
tion of will and reason that lay at the bottom of social relations
developed, according to him, toward a predominance of reason,
i.e., social development was a process of increasing rationality.

That defined the direction of social development: from the
community to society. The formation of rationality, Tonnies
thought, was the formation of society, which developed partly
in accordance with the community as the initial, or at least old-
er, form of living together, and partly in crying contradiction
with it. From that angle he analysed the dynamics of the devel-
opment of social structures of various kind, employing consider-
able factual material, and studied the social problems of con-
temporaneous society so demonstrating examples of the realisa-
tion of his own prescription, namely, to apply the mode of argu-
ment underlying this approach to the analysis of any historical
situation, and to the development of social life as a whole, at
least insofar as this development went from communal to so-
cial forms and entities.

This was how Tonnies tackled the main problem of his so-
ciological work, posed by the very course of ideological develop-
ment in the nineteenth century, namely, the problem of the
synthesis of the positive aspects of the Enlightenment and
romantic tendencies. The statics and dynamics of social life,
the mechanical and organic structure of social ‘bodies’, and
the rational and historical approaches to study of society were
equally reflected in his sociology (pure and applied).

Tonnies’ sociology made the step from the socio-philo-
sophical speculations characteristic of the preceding period to the
developing of an objective, scientific sociology devoid of pre-
conceived value positions and political orientations, and devoid

181

of the moraliser trend inherent in the philosophy of history.
The ‘scientific character’ of Tonnies’ sociology was oriented on
a quite definite image of science, namely, the positivist one.
In the achievements of his sociological conception he included
(1) objectivity, (2) its inherent naturalist tendency, and (3) its
independence on value premisses and practical social activity.

The freedom of science in its positivist understanding presup-
posed freedom from politics. Tonnies posed the question of the
relationship of sociology and politics very broadly in general,
viz., as a matter of the relation of social theory and social prac-
tice, or, in the language of some of the more recent writers,
knowledge and interest. Avoidance of value judgements was not,
according to him, refusal to study social values. On the con-
trary, only a sociological, scientific, objective study of values
could give politics a reliable basis and develop scientifically
substantiated forms of political activity. What one had to do to
obtain certain effects had to be demonstrated scientifically, but
a number of sciences did not contain such tenets. They were
not really sciences, but crafts and technology, he said.® Politics
was one of these crafts or arts employing data provided by
sciences. The difference between them was that science made
values the object of study, but politics made them the basis of
activity. It was irrelevant, from the scientific standpoint, Ton-
nies said, or even harmful for the observer, whether a given end
was ‘wished’. The practician started, however, from what was
wished or wanted; he strove for that end, and wanted to know
whether it was possible in general to know it with scientific cer-
tainty. The scientist dealt with causes and effects. The scientific
person only wanted to know; the practical person wanted to
act.°

The thesis of the freedom of science from politics was also
aimed against the political philosophy of romanticism, con-
sciously and purposely oriented on justifying the political ac-
tions of the reactionary regimes of Europe.

But, while separating science from politics, Tonnies by no
means set himself the aim of separating politics from science.
He aspired to make politics ‘scientific’, and did not want to
erect an impassable wail between the two kinds of activity. As
will be seen from the arguments referred to above, the cogni-
tive position of the scientist and practical person, described by

182

Tonnies, was in fact a description of two different cognitive
stances followed by one and the same person, who figured now
as a politician and now as a sociologist. That form of descrip-
tion was not fortuitous, and can be readily related to Tonnies
himself, for he (according to the testimony of contemporaries)
combined features of the dispassionate scientist with the passion
of a constitutionalist politician, social reformer, and democrat.

TOnnies’ practical activity as a politician, and the directions,
ends, and means of social work he chose, corresponded in fact
to the main tenets of his sociological theory.

The proposition about growth of rationality during social
development, formulated in the context of applied sociology,
naturally led to a need to fight for democracy against class and
feudal prejudices. Because he considered enlightenment and
education of the proletariat a necessary stage after the bour-
geois enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, Tonnies took an active part in the Social-Democratic and
labour movement, defended freedom of speech and the right
to form trade unions, and came out in support of the strikers
during the famous Kiel strike of 1896-97.

His sociological activity lasted more than 50 years, and his
theoretical ideas reflected features of the social changes that
were taking place in Germany at the turn of the century.

These changes were generated by the consolidation of capi-
talism in Germany, and its transition to the imperialist stage of
capitalist development. While that process proceeded more slow-
ly on the Continent than in the United Kingdom, which had
made its bourgeois revolution back in the seventeenth century,
the social transformations proceeded even more slowly in Ger-
many, which had been the ‘backwoods’ of Europe up to then.
Territorial fragmentation, the absence of firm statehood, the
preservation of a host of feudal and guild survivals all retarded
the formation of German imperialism, which only began to de-
velop actively in the 1870s and 1880s.

Tonnies, drawing on the works of English and German eth-
nologists, jurists, and students of statecraft, registered in the basic
concepts of his sociology the main characteristic features of the
changes in society’s spheres pertaining to constitutional law and
value standards typical of this transition period.

He did not bring out the real material basis of these changes,

183

because of his idealist understanding of the very nature of the
social process. It was the factor of thought, he claimed, and
consequently of reason, that was the dynamic element in any
cultural development, as in the spiritual development of the in-
dividual. This meant that it determined individual people’s
behaviour and thinking to an increasing extent, and also that of
the people who constituted groups and associations in their
joint activity and common will.'° That sort of treatment of the
nature of the social process naturally ruled out any possibility
of knowing the real socio-economic processes underlying his-
torical changes.

Tonnies was well acquainted with the works of Marx analys-
ing the capitalist mode of production. His interest in Marxism,
furthermore, had a stable, constant character. On his own re-
cognition, interest in the problems of ‘the crisis of culture’ had
been aroused in him, not least, by reading the first volume
of Capital, although (he added) Marxism had not had a direct
influence on the development of his own ideas.

In fact not only did Marx’s principled conclusions prove alien
to Ténnies, but also his posing of the problems. In one of his
papers Toénnies defined the essence of Marx’s theory of so-
ciety in the spirit of an abstract theory of factors, i.e., social
reality was an interaction of three very general! factors (eco-
nomics, politics, and spirit), the development of each of which
proceeded independently of the others, but the economic iife
was a relatively more independent variable. That kind of dog-
matic breaking down into factors and variables like the abstract
notion of ‘economic life’ is alien to the spirit of Marxism.

Not recognising the dialectical spirit and wholeness of the
nature of Marxism, Ténnies repeatedly counterposed the rigor-
ous theory of Marx, the Marx of Capital to the Marx of The
Communist Manifesto. This counterposing, quite in the liberal-
bourgeois spirit, revealed how deeply mistaken Ténnies’ ideas
about the labour movement and its ideology were. In the end
he evaluated Marxism as an ‘unquestionably false explanation’. '!

T6nnies’ refusal to see the material patterns at the bottom
of social life, and the impossibility in connection with that of
accepting class struggle as the dynamic factor of the develop-
ment of the constitutional-law and value spheres of society con-
siderably reduced the significance of his sociological ideas.

184

That was why the source of the existence of the communi-
ty and society as the basic forms of joint human life remained
essentially unclarified. Where did the common will (Wesen-
wille) come from, that cemented together and united individuals
in the whole of their joint life? How, given the dominance of
private will (Kurwille) did the mechanical interaction of indi-
viduals result in a certain social wholeness or entity? What in
general were the factors that constituted this wholeness in each
concrete case?'? Marxism concluded that social will embodied
the will of the class predominant in society, which determined
the structure and forms of the concrete manifestations of
human interactions. Tonnies, however, worked out detailed de-
finitions, gave circumstantial descriptions of community and
society, but proved unable to disclose the nature of will, i-e.,
of social power, the power of the social whole over the separate
individual in each concrete case. Both of the main concepts of
his sociology remained postulated rather than deduced from
analysis of the reality of social life.

It was this absence of interest in reality, above all in the
reality of the interactions, conflicts, and clashes of interests
of social groups and classes that caused one of the deficien-
cies of Ténnies’ typology of society, viz., its inadequate de-
scription of community. He depicted social relations within a
community as relations of agreement and mutual understand-
ing, friendship, co-operation, spiritual friendliness, etc. He
ignored everything ‘negative’ in the emotional sense, and also
relations of a conflict nature. R. Koenig justly noted that Tén-
nies refused to see elements of compulsion in the community.
In fact he drew an unhistorical, idealised image of the communi-
ty, putting a picture with a certain ethical and ideological under-
lying idea in place of the complex contradictory reality of the
relations within a community.

This underlying idea was the reason for the contradictory
character of the political sense of Tonnies’ doctrine.

There was yet another consequence of the ignoring of con-
flicts and contradictions in social life, viz., the formal, me-
taphysical character of Tonnies’ complicated and ramified clas-
sifications. These were not an end in themselves for Tonnies,
of course; they served him for purposes of detailed study of
the processes of historical change taking place at various levels

185

and in various spheres of social life. He himself tried to formalise
sociological knowledge and to find some universal system
of characteristics applicable to analysis of the most varied
spheres of society’s life, irrespective of the content of the
subject-matter.

Posed that way, however, the problem contained a deep,
inner contradiction. It was the formal character of Ténnies’
classification and the absence of criteria for singling out the
main, determining types of relations and groups which made
them useful only for describing processes of change that were
really happening, excluding the possibility of developing sociolog-
ical explanations of history by means of them. In other words,
these classifications inevitably degenerated into certain conven-
tions, into a conventional language which could not furnish
‘essential’, positive knowledge of the reality investigated.

T6nnies’s sociological system thus could not serve as an ex-
planation of the processes of historical development.

The ‘community-society’ typology did not remain an ideo-
logically neutral instrument for describing social processes. How-
ever Tonnies tried to stress the neutral-value character of his
ideas, and their isolation from philosophy, history, politics, and
ethics, the actual content of his works gave grounds for many
scholars to interpret his analysis of development from commu-
nal to social forms as a hidden philosophy of history, as an ide-
ology of the destruction of culture with a quite definite, reac-
tionary political sense. Such an interpretation proved possible,
in fact, because of Tonnies’ idealisation, described above, of
social relations within a community.

TOnnies was a sociologist who stood at the boundary of two
periods of bourgeois sociology. He formed one aspect of his
work in the nineteenth century, as was indicated by his striv-
ing to develop a ‘philosophy of history as sociology’ and endeav-
our to create a broad cultural-historical synthesis and mechan-
istic theory of social knowledge, and also by the absence of a
rigorous differentiation in his theory of sociological ideas pro-
per, and ideas of jurisprudence and constitutional studies.

On the other hand he put forward a number of ideas that
were further developed and realised in the Western, non-Marxian
sociology of the twentieth century. These were primarily the
idea of the analytical (in contrast to historical) structure of so-

186

ciology, which witnessed to an awareness of it, in itself, as a
science, and of its striving to find its own place and its own ap-
proach to the analysis of society. Ténnies was one of the first
in non-Marxian sociology to pose the problem of social struc-
ture, which has come, precisely since then, to be regarded as
specially sociological, guaranteeing a special point of view, and
a special mode of posing problems. The idea of developing a
formal sociology that analysed its subject-matter irrespective of
the latter’s content was taken up by another notable sociolo-
gist of the turn of the century, Georg Simmel, and was later de-
veloped by von Wiese, Vierkandt, and several others.

An essential aspect of Tonnies’ sociology, furthermore, was
his naturalistic theory of social knowledge, which has been con-
tinued and developed in many versions in twentieth-century so-
ciology.

Yet the main thing that he bequeathed to the modern soci-
ology of the West was the idea of distinguishing two types of so-
cial relations and ties, embodied in the concepts of community
and society. These ideas were taken up by Emile Durkheim,
who distinguished a society with ‘organic’ and ‘mechanical’
solidarity. This typology was applied in an appropriately re-
worked form, and is still being applied by many Western soci-
ologists, philosophers, and historians, to explain the main con-
flict of contemporary historical development.

Notes

! See Ferdinand Tonnies. Studien zur Philosophie und Gesellschaftsleh-
re im 17. Jahrhundert. Edited by E. G. Jacoby (Frommann-Holzboog,
Stuttgart, 1975), p 240.

2 See Ferdinand Tonnies. Die Entstehung meiner Begriff Gemeinschaft
und Gesellschaft. In: Kélner Zeitschrift fiir Soziologie und Sozialpsycho-
logie, 1955, 7, 3: 464.

3 bid.

“ Ferdinand Tonnies. Community and Association. Translated by Charles
Loomis (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1955), p 119.

5 See Ferdinand Tonnies. Einfiihrung in die Soziologie (Ferdinand Enke
Verlag, Stuttgart, 1981), p 6.

® Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation. Trans-

187

lated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (OUP, New York, 1947).
See also: Lewis A. Coser. Masters of Sociological Thought (Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1977), pp 217-218.

7 See Ferdinand Tonnies. Einfiihrung in die Soziologie, p 316.

* See Ferdinand Ténnies. Soziologische Studien und Kritiken, Vol. 1
(Verlag von Gustav Fischer, Jena, 1925), p 305.

° Ibid. p 305.

1° Ferdinand Tonnies. Art. cit., pp 464-465.

'! Ferdinand Tonnies. Einfiihrung in die Soziologie, p 270.

1? Both types of social relations are often explained as the product of
realising individual mental strivings: instinctive impulses (Triebwille) and
rationally conditioned impulses (Zweckwille). That interpretation, intro-
duced by Wundt, distorts the sense that Tonnies invested the concept of
social will with. First, will and intellect are absolutely separated by that
(for Tonnies’ rationalist treatment of will, see what has been said above).
Second, will thereby begins to be treated as a purely psychic formation
and the socio-political sense of the concept is eliminated (cf. will of the
people, will of the voters), which probably plays a paramount role in
Ténnies’ system.

9

GEORG SIMMEL’S SOCIOLOGY

Leonid Ionin

Life and Activity

Georg Simmel was born in Berlin in 1858. After the classical
secondary school (gymnasium), he matriculated in the philoso-
phy faculty of Berlin University, where his teachers were the
historians Mommsen, Steinthal, and Bastian, and the philos-
opher Eduard Zeller. In his student days his interests were con-
centrated on philosophy, history, and psychology. In 1881 Sim-
mel received his doctorate in philosophy for a dissertation on
Kant; four years later he became a privat-dozent, and fifteen
years later was elected an ‘extraordinary professor’ of Berlin
University, i.e., an unsalaried professor, who had no pay except
students’ fees for lectures. Only in 1914, after 30 years of suc-
cessful teaching and scientific work, did he become a ‘full’
professor in Strasbourg, where he died in 1918.

During his life Simmel was one of the most popular sociolo-
gists of Europe, which he owed not least to his teaching talent,
but also to his ability to react instantly and sharply to the pres-
sing problems of social life. Though he did not concern him-
self with what is now called applied research, Simmel neverthe-
less knew how to make sociology an ‘applied’ science, provid-
ing explanations that brought out the essence of pressing social
problems. Hence also the breadth of his sociological interests
(the sociology of art, urban sociology, the sociology of sex,

189

sociology of science, general sociology, problems of social
differentiation, etc.).

Along with Nietzsche, Dilthey, and others, Simmel was a
leading spokesman of the so-called philosophy of life. In po-
litics, and in his publicistic activity, he adopted a liberal stance,
but during the First World War fell into a kind of chauvinistic
blindness. In his book Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidun-
gen (The War and the Spiritual Decision) (1917) he enthusias-
tically glorified the ‘German spirit’.

Simmel’s main sociological works were the following: Uber
soziale Differenzierung (Social Differentiation) (1890), Die
Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Problems of the Philo-
sophy of History) (1892), Philosophie des Geldes (Philosophy
of Money) (1900), Soziologie. Untersuchungen tiber die Formen
der Vergesellschaftung (Sociology. Inquiries into the Forms of
Sociation) (1908), and Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur (The
Conflict of Modern Culture) (1918).

Simmel is considered one of the founders of ‘formal sociolo-
gy’ along with Tonnies, but the significance of his work goes far
beyond the framework of the formal school.

1. The Origin and Main Problem of Sociology

Sociology, Simmel wrote, arose like any other science, from
practical necessity ‘as a weapon in the struggle for existence’.!
The sociological posing of problems arose at the turn of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parallel with the awaken-
ing of the masses’ political and practical activity in the struggle for
their rights against the interests of separate individuals. Because
classes whose strength consisted in their ‘social being’ rather
than in the obvious significance of the individual persons drew
upon theoretical consciousness, following practical power rela-
tions, he wrote, it became understandable all at once that each
individual phenomenon was determined by an immensity of in-
fluences from the human environment.”

It was then that the society of the past ‘arose’, along with
the society of the present, and later, too, ‘society in general’,
as a substance forming individual existence ‘like the sea forms
waves’. And it was then that the idea of the social essence of

190

man and of historical events took shape, and the traditional
‘sciences of society’ got the opportunity of a new approach
to the still unresolved problems bothering them.

Simmel suggested, however, that sociology did not exist as
a special science in that period because it lacked a special object,
which would arise from observation of the traditional objects
of social knowledge ‘from a new angle’. For that purpose it was
also necessary to distinguish the concept of society as such,
which existed apart from any phenomena and any given socio-
historical moment, ie., a concept of society as an aggregate of
pure forms of sociation (Vergesellschaftung).°

2. Form and Content. The Project of Formal Sociology

The concept of form and its closely linked concept of content
are the most important ones in Simmel’s pure, or formal socio-
logy.

In one of his earlier works he proposed to regard the history
of society as that of psychic or mental phenomena. Each psy-
chic phenomenon had to be taken in two aspects: on the one
hand, as a psychic act presenting itself as a wish, remembrance,
affirmation, etc.; on the other hand, as what is desired, remem-
bered, asserted, etc., in each such act. When we isolated this lat-
ter aspect of a psychic act, Simmel considered, we got the ob-
jective content of consciousness, which was in no way psycholo-
gical. This content was what was understood in the philosophy
of life as ‘experience’ (Erlebnis); according to Simmel it was the
‘matter’ or ‘body’ of the social.

Form, in turn, was best defined by the tasks it performed.
These, according to Simmel, were the following: (1) form relat-
ed several contents together in such a way that they formed a
unity; (2) in acquiring form these contents were separated off
from other contents; (3) forms structured the contents that
they relate mutually to one another. What we call form, Simmel
said, is the unification of material from the angle of the func-
tion it performs; it breaks down the isolation of the parts that
compose it. The whole, as a unity of these parts, is opposed to
any other material that does not possess form or is formed
otherwise.*

191

As regards sociology the counterposing of form and content
should thus be understood as a counterposing of the ‘matter’ of
social interaction (the culturally, historically conditioned pro-
ducts of the human mind; the aims, aspirations, and needs of in-
dividuals) and the interaction structures most often repeated
and characteristic of all cultural, historical events and phenom-
ena of any sort.

Human society, according to Simmel, arose in the combina-
tion and aggregate of these structures. The job of formal socio-
logy was consequently not to divide whole social formations
into two parts, but to single out those aspects of them that con-
stituted society as an interpersonal, interindividual phenomenon.
He did not try to compile an exhaustive ‘catalogue’ of human
relationships (though he was often reproached for doing so,
incidentally). On the contrary, he considered that pure formal
concepts were of limited value, and that the project of formal
sociology would only be realised adequately when the singling
out of pure forms of sociation was accompanied with an expla-
nation of what they meant as pure forms of human behaviour,
under what circumstances they arose, how they developed, what
changes they underwent owing to the peculiarities of their ob-
ject and from what simultaneous, formal, and material attributes
of the society they arose or declined.* In other words, each
form of sociation, when identified as such, should become the
object of a historical, meaningful description.

3. Patterns of Social Forms

Simmel did not leave a systematic classification of social forms,
but he did make several aspects of social life the subject of his
research, singling them out as forms from their ‘live’ reality:
dominance, subordination, rivalry, division of labour, formation
of parties, and so on. All these forms, he suggested, were repro-
duced, and filled with an appropriate content, in various types
of group and social organisation, which could in turn be treated
as forms (in the state and a religious community, in a group of
conspirators, in a business association, in the family, in an art
school, and so on). He gave examples of the study of these and
similar forms in the papers that constituted one of his best
known works Soziologie.

192

Three groups of forms could be distinguished: social process-
es, social types, and models of development. Social processes in-
cluded phenomena that were constant irrespective ot the con-
crete circumstances of their realisation (such as subordination,
domination, rivalry, conciliation, etc.).

An example of a social process was a universal phenomenon
like fashion. Vogue or fashion, Simmel considered, simulta-
neously presupposed both imitation and _ individualisation
(which in turn represented forms of social processes). A person
following the fashion simultaneously both differentiated him-
self/herself from others, and asserted his/her membership of a
certain stratum or group.

Simmel demonstrated the impossibility of fashion without a
striving for individualisation by the point that in primitive so-
cieties, characterised by maximum social uniformity, in which
there was no striving to be singled out from the general mass,
there was also no fashion. Just as in any society governed by
a comparatively small group of people, members of the rul-
ing oligarchy wore an identical, strict dress, not wanting to
demonstrate their exclusiveness vis-a-vis the general mass of
citizens (an example was the Venetian doges, who always
wore black).

The impossibility of fashion without a striving toward imita-
tion, and to merge with the collectivity, was proved by the fact
that there was no fashion in societies characterised by a break-
down of group standards. In Florence of the Trecento, for
example, everyone followed his/her own style of dress; there
was no vogue because there was no striving to merge with the
collectivity.

As soon as any phenomenon (dress, ideas, manners, things,
etc.) become ‘fashionable’ they then begin ‘to go out of fa-
shion’. It is also the fascination of fashion that it is simultane-
ously new and passing. Fashion gives a feeling of the present,
and a sensation of the passage of time. A reason for the very
wide spread of fashion in modern times, Simmel said, was pre-
cisely the dissolution of old convictions, habits, and traditions,
rooted in faith and belief, as a result of which temporary, tran-
sient forms became more active. Hence, too, the dominating
influence of fashion in art, the sciences, even in morals.

Yet, in spite of the transient character of any concrete

13-1147

fasion, it has a certain constancy as a social form: fashion has
always existed in one form or another.®

The second category of social forms was the social type. A
person involved in a certain kind of relation acquired certain
characteristic qualities essential for him, ie., that were con-
stantly displayed irrespective of the nature of any specific in-
teraction. Examples of social type studied by Simmel were the
cynic, the poor, the coquette, the aristocrat, etc.

As in the example of fashion cited above, Simmel’s thought
moved dialectically when characterising social types by a distin-
guishing of characteristic contradictions. The daily life of a so-
cial type like the aristocrat, for example, was a unity of two mu-
tually exclusive characteristics: on the one hand, he was abso-
lutely absorbed in his group and family tradition, because he
was a limb of the family tree; on the other hand, he was an ab-
solute separate from the group and even opposed to it, because
strength, independence, and personal responsibility were the
nub of the tradition characteristic of the aristocracy.’

An example of social forms belonging to the third group,
known as models of development, was the universal process of
the connection between the extension or expansion of a group
and the intensification of individuality.

As a group increased, Simmel wrote, its members became less
and less like one another. The increase in individuality was ac-
companied with degradation of the group. The smaller, i-e., the
more peculiar, a group was, on the contrary, the less individual
its members were. History developed toward an increase in indi-
viduality at the expense of the individuals’ loss of their unique
social characteristics: the extended family was replaced by in-
dependent, equal individuals and the nuclear family; guild and
blood-relation organisation was replaced by civil society with
its characteristic high individual responsibility.

Social forms could be classified in a different way—by their
degree of remoteness from directly meaningful, psychological
manifestations. Such spontaneous forms as exchange, personal
bent, imitation, and forms connected with the behaviour of
crowds, etc., Simmel thought, were least separated from con-
tent. Stabler, more independent forms, such as economic and
other formal organisations (formal in the now customary, so-
ciological sense, and not in Simmel’s) were somewhat further re-

194

moved from the social ‘matter’ and the social content.

Finally, Simmel’s ‘play’ forms were the furthest from the
spontaneousness of social life. They were ‘pure forms of socia-
tion’ that are not mental abstractions but forms really existing
(or rather really encountered) in social life. They were pure be-
cause the content that once ‘filled’ them had disappeared.
Examples were the following: that which was understood by the
‘old regime’, i.e., a political form that had outlived its time and
did not meet the needs of the individuals involved in it; ‘sci-
ence for science’s sake’, i.e., knowledge isolated from human
needs, that had ceased to be a ‘weapon in the struggle for exist-
ence’; ‘art for art’s sake’, etc.

‘Free sociability’ (Geselligkeit) was a ‘play’ form exceptional
in its role and significance. It was sociability for sociability’s
sake, arranged without no other purpose than to enjoy com-
pany and be with others. That kind of intercourse was a play
form of sociation or an abstract model of the social process
without any meaningful elements. Individuals entered ,into it
as ‘formal’ individuals lacking any meaningful characteristics
(such as capability, wealth, status, power or authority, beliefs
or convictions, etc.); this sociability was the intercourse of
‘equals’. Tact was the means of ensuring this equality; it limited
any kind of meaningful aspirations and impulses of the parties;
it was tactless to talk ‘shop’ at an evening party, to discuss ab-
stract problems, to show off one’s wit or one’s wealth. Tact,
consequently, was a play or game form of social standards. Flir-
tation or coquetry was a game form of sexual relations, imperso-
nal, ‘empty’, without real erotic content. The conversation at
such a party was an end in itself; its theme, of course, was not
a matter of indifference, but the main thing was not the theme,
nor its content, but the satisfaction from the general conversa-
tion itself, from talk and conversation that embodied free socia-
bility, i.e., intercourse for intercourse’s sake.”

4. Philosophical Sociology.
The Theory of Understanding

Simmel demonstrated the idea of pure sociology most fully and
consistently in his analysis of free sociability. But in it he also

195

exhausted this idea by demonstrating its limits. Pure sociology,
he considered, was only possible along with a philosophical so-
ciology that set theoretical-cognitive and socio-philosophical
guideposts for pure sociology, endowing it with terms and con-
ditions, fundamental ideas, and premisses unrelated to experi-
ence and the direct object of knowledge, and having no place
within them.'°

Simmel posed the problems of the connection of sociology
and philosophy, and of its philosophical foundation, as prob-
lems (a) of the development of a sociological theory of knowl-
edge and (b) the creation of a historical sociology or, as he
himself put it, a social metaphysics.

He considered the theory of historical understanding a specif-
ic theory of knowledge of social phenomena. He regarded this
theory, which he had already developed in Problems of the Phi-
losophy of History, as a philosophical methodology of cogni-
tion that served as a guide for applying general scientific methods
like induction, typologising, etc., during sociological analysis. In
addition, understanding served as the connecting link between
pure or formal sociology and social philosophy. It was a means
of historical comprehension of the data and facts accessible to
formal sociology.

Essentially hypothetical formations that are perceived and
discussed as historical truths arise, Simmel wrote, only in the
mental activity of the researcher, who orders the facts in accor-
dance with the prevailing ideas and values, puts them into com-
binations from which arise solutions of problems that could not
even have been posed if the researcher had relied only and ex-
clusively on the initial series of experience, and only in such
activity.

This ‘mental activity’ was essentially an activity of under-
standing and its directing and organising—and regulating —prin-
ciple was the ‘whole image’ of the social world that figured in
the image of historical sociology.

5. Historical Sociology

Underlying historical sociology are the ideas of the develop-
ment of society as a functional differentiation accompanied

196

with a simultaneous integration of its various elements that were
characteristic of nineteenth-century evolutionism. This was due
to the influence of positivist evolutionism which had predomi-
nated in the initial stage of Simmel’s philosophical and sociolo-
gical work.

When describing above the type of the forms of sociation stu-
died by Simmel that he called the model of development, I
pointed out that according to him the size of a group correlates
closely with the degree of development of the individuality of
its members. In the same way, he added, the size of a group is
directly proportional to the degree of freedom enjoyed by its
members; the smaller the group, the more unitely it must func-
tion and the closer its members cling together so as to defend its
integrity against adverse effects of the environment.

With quantitative growth of a group, the permissible boun-
daries and limits of the identification of its members as such
were widened, and consequently opportunities opened up for
a variation of individuality; and the degree of individual free-
dom increased. Widening or extension of a group led to realisa-
tion of the spatial aspect of sociation, which led in turn (as
regards the processes of development of the psyche) to the
development of a capacity for abstraction; an increase in the
number of individuals in a group, accompanied with a differen-
tiation of its elements, generated a mental capacity for as-
sociations. Intellect, and a capacity for consciousness, thus
arose.!!

The rise and development of intellect went hand in hand
with the origin and development of a money economy. The ap-
pearance of money as a universal means of exchange was also
governed by the historical process of spatial extension and ine-
vitable differentiation of economic units. Money, like intellect,
developed parallel with growth of freedom and increasing indi-
vidualisation of the members of social groups (through division
of labour).!?

The rise of consciousness and development of money marked
the onset of society in its ‘historical’ period.

According to Simmel the history of society was the history
of increasing intellectualisation (i.e., in essence, rationalisation)
of social life and deepening of the influence of the principles
of a money economy. In other words, he identified the history

107

of society with the history of the moulding of modern capi-
talism, in which the characteristic general features of money
and intellect are most fully developed.

In his book on Kant, when discussing the intellectualism of
Kant’s philosophy, Simmel wrote that intellectualism was dis-
played, on the one hand, in the modern importance of science
(and indeed not just in its actual development but even more in
belief in it), in the fullness of life, since perfect science can gov-
ern it, a belief that grows steadily in the clash of Liberalism
and Socialism. On the other hand, Simmel thought, the all-per-
vading money economy demonstrated in practice the domina-
tion of the intellectual principle; undeclining logical consisten-
cy, rejection of all subjectivity, accessibility in principle for
everyone—were all characteristics of the money economy of mo-
dern times, and of its intellectuality.! *

In contrast to other theorists of the ‘capitalist spirit’, Simmel
did not link the rise of the money economy and intellectualism
with modern times and the origin of the capitalist economy and
ideology. It was a much more general concept, a kind of ‘evolu-
tionary universal’, whose level of development characterised the
different epochs of human history.

Intellectualism and the money economy were the guiding
concepts of Simmel’s historical-sociological conception. At the
same time he treated them as the most abstract of the forms of
socialisation. Simmel devoted the concluding chapter of his Phi-
losophy of Money to an analysis of these forms; that chapter is,
in essence, a phenomenology of the capitalist way of life.

6. Analysis of the ‘Spirit of Modernity’

Simmel considered the absence of certain qualitative traits, of
an expressed nature to be the prime, main feature equally char-
acterising both these forms.

The intellect, as a pure concept, [he wrote], is absolutely lacking in
character, not in the sense of being deficient in some necessary qua-
lity, but because it exists completely apart from the selective one-
sidedness that determines character.’ *

198

The same also applied to money.

There is obviously a lack of character in money too. Just as money
per se is the mechanical reflex of the relative value of things and
is equally useful to everyone, so within money transaction all per-
sons are of equal value, not because all but because none is valuable
except money.’ §

Intellect built a mechanistic image of the world with ruth-
less logic, driving out the naive subjectivism and direct compre-
hension inherent in preceding periods, replacing them by the
objectivity of the logical method.

Quality was lowered; the depth and fullness of mental experi-
ence characteristic of the past disappeared, of that past when

even such an intellectually outstanding and theoretically committed
person as Dante tells us that one should respond to certain theoret-
ical opponents not with arguments but only with the knife." °

The present spread of intellect—the all-determining spirit—en-
sured ease of understanding of one another by people of the
most varied origin and cast of mind, an ease whose reverse be-
came a levelling and lowering of the general standard of intellec-
tual life.

In exactly the same way, Simmel wrote, money, in the ine-
xorable unequivocalness of its effects ruled out display of any
kind of the naturalness and spontaneity so characteristic of the
past. Universal alienation reigned; money deprived the thing
produced of its purposeful character and converted it into a
means (the worker proved alienated from the product of his la-
bour); money separated the individual spatially, and then spiri-
tually from the things belonging to him, which ceased to be part
of his Ego,.and the owner was alienated from possession; the
subjective personal element disappeared from the relations of
those who governed and those who were governed, subordina-
tion became a part of technological necessity, a requirement of
‘business’—and individuals were alienated from one another in
production, and so on.

Universal alienation was accompanied with a growth of indi-
vidual freedom.

199

Since freedom means independence from the will of others, it com-
mences with independence from the will of specific individuals. The
lonely settler in the German or American forests is non-dependent;
the inhabitants of a modern metropolis are independent in the posi-
tive sense of the word, and even though they require innumerable
suppliers, workers and cooperators and would be lost without them,

their relationship to them is completely objective and is only embo-
died in money.’

Alienation and freedom were two sides of the same medal.

People lost the qualities of their individuality during the
course of this universal alienation, passed into ‘uniformity’ or
‘one-dimensionality’, and ceased to be preferring and preferred.
Prostitution became the symbol of interpersonal relations.

When Kant was formulating his categorical imperative, he
pointed out that a person should never regard another person as
a means, but should consider him as an end, and act according-
ly. Prostitution was behaviour that completely contradicted that
principle. In prostitution the person was a means, as regards
both parties. Simmel saw profound historical sense in the fact
that prostitution was linked in a very deep way with the money
economy.

Money also ruins the nature of things by its very touch.

Yet at that moment at which things that are viewed according to
their money value are so evaluated, they are removed from the
realm of this category, their qualitative value is subordinated to
their quantitative value and their total independence—the dual rela-
tionship to others and to itself—that we experience on a certain
level as distinction has lost its basis. The essence of prostitution,
which we recognized in money, is imparted to the objects...!®

Simmel studied the social function of money and of logical
consciousness in all their diverse and finest mediations and ma-
nifestations: in modern democracy, in formal law, in the ideolo-
gy of liberalism, in the omnipotence of science, in the develop-
ment of technology, in the trends of artistic taste, in the favour-
ite motifs and compositions of artistic works, and finally in the
very rhythm and tempo of modern life. In all fields and spheres
of joint human existence he discovered a ‘stylistic’ unity of

200

modern culture, governed by the nature of these two of its
guiding factors.

Objectivity is the style of modern culture—the objectivity of
money opposed to any meaningful, subjectively governed
characteristic of possession, which makes it absolutely indepen-
dent of any possibility of using it; the objectivity of logical
forms that exist independently of the content that fills them,
and which recognise the possible formal correctness of any judg-
ment, even a senseless and false one; in some sense or other the
objectivity of modern law is similar to it, with the invulnerable
formal correctness of created, sometimes flagrant, content-rich
or, as Simmel put it, material injustice. Such were the paradoxes
that arose from the development and combination of the two
main factors and that, according to Simmel, determined the
sense of the present time.

This sense was the increasing ‘devastation’ of the fundamen-
tal forms of sociation, their divorce from content, and their
conversion into self-sufficing ‘play’ forms, in short the relativisa-
tion of cultural content.

The emancipated individual was alienated from the objecti-
vity of the human spirit.

Just as the absolutist view of the world represents a definite stage of
intellectual development in correlation with the corresponding
practical, economic and emotional conditions of human affairs, so
the relativistic view of the world seems to express the momentary
relationship of adjustment on the part of our intellect. More ac-
curate, it is confirmed by the opposing image of social and subjec-
tive life, in which money has found its real effective embodiment
and the reflected symbol of its forms and movements.’ °

So Philosophy of Money was completed on a lofty note of
conscious and consistent relativism.

7. A Critical Assessment of Simmel’s Sociology

The structure of Simmel’s sociological conception reflected the
relativistic ideas, characteristic of his time about the structure
of knowledge in general and about the structure of social

201

knowledge in particular. These ideas were a consequence of
the incorrect conclusions he drew from his comprehension
of the real facts of the scientific and social development of his
time.

At the beginning of his philosophical work, which adhered
to the cognitive precepts characteristic of a positivistically
oriented naturalism, Simmel perceived the collapse of the
dogmas of traditional science extremely sharply. The revolution
in natural science that occurred at the turn of the century, and
the ‘crisis of physics’ were undoubtedly facts that pushed him
to a relativistic position.

But the facts of the social development of that time played
the greatest role in shaping his socio-philosophical ideas. The
turn of the century—the period when capitalist society entered
the epoch of imperialism—was characterised by a radical sharp-
ening of all the contradictions initially inherent in the social
system of capitalism. A result of that was a degradation of each
and every cultural standard and a relativising of the way of life
associated with it.

Simmel gave a brilliant description of this process from the
‘inside’, from the position of a participant in the happenings.
He demonstrated the phenomenon of the ‘devastation’ of social
forms no longer capable of containing the material motion of
things. But he was not able to give an objective explana-
tion of the process because he took up a relativistic, subjectivist
position.

He also did not accept the Marxian explanation of the ‘con-
flict of modern culture’. The Marxist conception of socio-econ-
omic development was dogmatic and non-reflexive, he said,
relating Marxism to versions of ‘historical realism’ whose ‘con-
structed’ nature his theory of historical understanding was
meant to explain.

But he very highly appreciated Marx’s dialectical analysis
of the role of money in the transformations of bourgeois con-
sciousness, Marx’s conception of alienation, and Marx’s study
of bourgeois ideological doctrines. The impact of Marx’s thought
is to be felt in many pages of Philosophy of Money.

While discovering a ‘positive content’ in historical material-
ism, Simmel considered it the task of his own socio-philosoph-
ical conception

202

to construct a new storey beneath historical materialism such that
the explanatory value of the incorporation of economic life into the
causes of intellectual culture is preserved, while these economic
forms themselves are recognized as the result of more profound va-
luations and currents of psychological or even metaphysical pre-
conditions.? °

In other words, he proposed to make the truths won by his-
torical materialism relative, ie., in fact to deprive it of its firm,
materialist foundation. His attempt to ‘improve’ Marxism was,
in fact, a fight against it. This aspiration of Simmel’s was quite
explicable, when we note the opposition of his own relativist
approach and the Marxian objective one to the study of social
life.

8. The Scientific Significance of Simmel’s Conception

Simmel gave an impressive description in his sociology of the
pernicious consequences of capitalist business activity and the
very deep contradictions of capitalist civilisation in the realms
of culture. His Philosophy of Money, the first edition of which
appeared in 1900, became the first of an endless series of works
by various authors devoted to analysing the ‘spirit of capital-
ism’. Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus (Modern Capitalism),
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(and a number of his essays on the sociology of religion), the
works of Stammler, Troeltsch, Scheler, and even, later, of
Spengler, (who provided a theory of capitalism in the second
volume of his The Decline of the West), and of the sociologists
and philosophers of the anthropological trend (Gehlen, Plessner,
Rothacker), and in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Auf-
kldrung (Dialectics of Education), and other works of the critic-
al philosophers and sociologists of the Frankfort school, all ap-
peared after Simmel’s, but far from all of them contained so
sharp a criticism of the spiritual system of capitalism. One can
agree with the German writer Woyslawski, who wrote about
Philosophy of Money that the whole book, in spite of the ab-
sence of an ethical feel, and the abstract ‘impersonalness’ of
its style, sounded from start to finish like an arraignment.”!
Many of these authors had to experience the horror of fascism

203

in order to understand how capitalism corrupts the soul and
spirit of people.

Simmel’s historical, sociological conception, and his analy-
sis of the ‘spirit of modern times’, made him one of the found-
ers of the critical tradition in Western sociology.

As I have shown above, Simmel interpreted formal sociology
as a concrete science of society that took its world-outlook
sense and main theoretical and methodological guidelines from
philosophical sociology. That approach was quite legitimate in
itself. One must not forget that it was developed at a time when
the need to shape sociology as an independent science com-
pelled even the most abstractly thinking theorists to proclaim
their rejection of philosophy, and of every kind of ‘specula-
tion’ and ‘metaphysics’. It was then, too, that the ideal of
neutral-value knowledge, traditional in Western sociology, and
quite impracticable in practice, took shape.

Simmel did not try to combine the social-philosophy (his-
torical) and formal-sociological approaches. He set himself the
task ‘of finding in each of life’s details the totality of its mean-
ing’.2? He did not manage to disclose the full sense, rooted
in the history of material production, of both the historical pro-
cess and its modern stage, and consequently to provide a fully
adequate explanation of the partial facts of social life, but his
aspiration to base analytical study of society’s life on a founda-
tion of historical vision deserves a positive evaluation. What he
did in that direction, it has transpired, was largely lost by non-
Marxian sociology in the subsequent stages of its development.

There has been a marked revival of interest in Simmel’s so-
ciological work in the West in recent decades. One can even
speak of a ‘Simmel revival’. The most important reason for it,
one can say, is lack of confidence in the apologetically orient-
ed official branch of sociology and the growth within it of al-
ternative, socio-critical trends. In that sense Simmel is a modern
thinker even today.

Notes

* Georg Simmel. Soziologie. Untersuchungen tiber die Formen der
Vergesellschaftung (Verlag von Duncker & Humbiot, Munich, 1922), p 1.

204

? Ibid.

3 Ibid., p 4.

* See Georg Simmel. Kant (Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, Leip-
zig, 1904) p 38.

5 See Georg Simmel. Soziologie, pp 10-11.

® Georg Simmel. Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essais (Kroner,
Leipzig, 1919).

7 See Georg Simmel. Soziglogie, p 34.

8 Ibid., pp 527-532.

° See Georg Simmel. Grundfragen der Soziologie (Individuum und
Gesellschaft), 2nd ed. (Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, 1920), pp 50-71.

'° Ibid., p 31.

'1 See Georg Simmel. Soziologie, p 480.

1? Ibid., p 553.

'3 Georg Simmel. Kant, p 7.

14 Georg Simmel. Philosophy of Money, Translated by Tom Bot-
tomore and David Frisby (Routledge & Kegal Paul, London, 1978),
p 432.

1S Ibid.

© Ibid.

'7 Tbid., p 300.

18 Ibid., p 392.

19 Ibid., p 512.

7° Ibid., p 56.

71 Hersch-Leib Woyslawski. Georg Simmels Philosophie des kapita-
listischen Geistes (Druck von Arthur Schplem, Berlin, 1931), p 13.

22 Georg Simmel. Philosophy of Money, p. 55.

10
EMILE DURKHEIM’S SOCIOLOGY

Elena Osipova

1. Durkheim’s Socio-Political Position

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was marked in
France by capitalism’s entry into the imperialist stage with its
inherent phenomena of economic, political, and spiritual crisis.
The socio-economic system could not ensure its own stable exis-
tence and was constantly being threatened by revolutionary ac-
tions of the masses of the working people. And clerical-mon-
archical circles were struggling against the bourgeois republicans,
striving to restore the reactionary social order.

The spiritual mainstay of reaction was the spiritualistic
philosophy. At the same time there was a noticeable strengthen-
ing of the influence of Comtean positivism in various fields of
spiritual culture at the end of the century. The idea that socio-
logy was an independent science that should become the basis
for a reorganisation of society gradually found support among
the republicans who were putting forward a programme of socio-
political reforms.

Between 1870 and 1914 sociological thought developed in
several directions in France. One of these was headed by the fol-
lowers of Le Play, who made monographic studies of the eco-
nomic and family position of various groups of the population.
Ideologically the Le Playists were very conservative, and saw
support for the shaky social order in religion.

‘Social statisticians’, for the most part civil servants, made

206

empirical studies for various public institutions.

The sociologists of the various positivist orientations were
grouped around René Worms’ International Journal of Socio-
logy. A leading place among them was taken by Tarde, Kova-
levsky, Novicow, de Roberty, and other active members of the
Paris Sociological Society and the International Institute of So-
ciology.

‘Catholic sociologists’, adherents of Thomism, took up a
theological position.

But none of these trends could serve as the theoretical basis
of bourgeois republicans’ socio-political aspirations. The theore-
tical and methodological conception called ‘sociologism’, which
found its fullest expression in the writings of Emile Durkheim
(1858-1917), became the theoretical foundation of their policy
and the ideology of social reformism, a necessary premiss of
which was ‘class peace’ and consensus universalis.

After studying philosophy in the Ecole Normale Superieure
in Paris, Durkheim began to teach in provincial lycées, at the
same time reading the sociological literature and contributing as
a reviewer to philosophical journals. After visiting Germany to
acquaint himself with the state of philosophy, the social scien-
ces, and ethics there, he was invited in 1887 to teach a course of
social sciences in the University of Bordeaux. In 1896 he be-
came the head of the first French chair of pedagogy and social
science, in the university.

A group of pupils and followers gathered around Durkheim:
Marcel Granet, Célestin Bouglé, Georges Davy, Francois Si-
miand, Paul Fauconnet, Maurice Halbwachs, Marcel Mauss. In
1896 Durkheim began publishing L ‘Année sociologique, in col-
laboration with them, which had great influence on the develop-
ment of French social studies.

The ideological and theoretical sources of Durkheim’s scien-
tific work and teaching were the conceptions of the Enlighten-
ment, especially those of Montesquieu, Condorcet, and Rous-
seau, and also the ideas of Saint-Simon and Comte. Kant’s ethics
had a big influence on him, and also Wundt’s folk psychology,
and certain ideas of the German historical school of jurispru-
dence.

Durkheim published his first three major works in the 1890s.
In his doctoral dissertation The Division of Labor in Society

207

(1893) he set out his socio-political platform subsequently con-
cretised and refined both by himself and by his ‘school’. The
second work The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895) was
devoted to substantiating the theoretical and methodological
conceptions of ‘sociologism’.' The Rules prepared the ground
for constituting sociology as an independent discipline. In his
sociological study Suicide (1897) Durkheim undertook to unite
the theoretical approach to the explanation of this phenomenon
with an analysis of the empirical data, which served as the basis
for the theoretical hypothesis.

In 1902 Durkheim was invited to the Sorbonne, and from
1906 was Professor of the chair of the Science of Education.
In 1913 his chair was renamed that of the Science of Education
and Sociology.

For fiftieen years after his move to Paris he was occupied
with teaching, and with developing sociological problems of
morality and education. The results of this work were the fol-
lowing books: Education et sociologie (1922), Moral Education
(1925), L’evolution de pedagogique en France (1938) and
Legon de sociologie (1950).

His many years’ study of problems of religion were crowned
by a work devoted to Australian totemism The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life (1912).

Durkheim’s ‘sociological school’ won itself a firm position in
French social studies, but his work was interrupted by the First
World War. He responded to the war by taking part in public
activity for the ‘moral inspiration’ of the nation. While denying
the imperialist nature of the war as regards the Allies, in parti-
cular France, he denounced Germany’s imperialist aims, and her
drive for world hegemony.”

Feeling the crisis of capitalist society acutely, and trying to
combat it by sociologically based plans of social reconstruction
and correction, Durkheim wanted to create a new bourgeois
ideology that would have a scientific character. In accordance
with the positivist conception a scientific sociology should be-
come a new symbol of faith, an ideology, even a ‘religion’ of
contemporary society. The measures and means proposed by
Durkheim to tackle socio-political problems, based on the idea
of class solidarity, were aimed at peaceful settlement of the
contradiction between labour and capital. He tried to sub-

208

stantiate the capitalist slogan, of social solidarity, popular at the
time, and based all his teaching on the ideas of the positivist
conception of science.

While campaigning for secularisation of school and university
education, and for liberation of social and intellectual life from
clerical influence, Durkheim constantly opposed the pervasive
dominant influence of clericals and made no small contribution
to substantiating the policy of separation of Church and state,
and of the school from the Church, which was crowned by pass-
ing of the appropriate legislation in 1905.

While rejecting revolution, Durkheim called for the organisa-
tion of trade syndicates that would, in his view, improve public
morals, and for educational reform. The trade syndicates or cor-
porations, covering whole branches of labour, and uniting capi-
talists and workers in a single public body dealing with all the
problems both of the trade or profession and of its relations
with other professional associations, would, in Durkheim’s
view, help the government to settle social problems and regulate
all types of human activity.

He did not understand the complexity of the growing social-
ist movement and the radical differences between the numerous
groupings of its members. His attitude to socialism, therefore,
was (1) undifferentiated, (2) marked by sympathy for certain
socialistic ideas, in particular those of Saint-Simon, and (3)
characterised by lack of understanding of the class essence of
Marx’s scientific socialism and by rejection of the significance
of class struggle.

Durkheim maintained close relations with Jaurés, the leader
of French socialists. Their views undoubtedly coincided on a
number of points and they influenced each other. Many of
the members of Durkheim’s school were close to reformist
socialism of a Jaurés type. Marcel Mauss, Frangois Simiand,
and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl were members of the Socialist Party.
Some of them were involved in the founding of L’Humanité,
then the organ of the Socialist Party, and contributed to it.
Many of the Durkheimians taught in the Socialist School whose
aim was propaganda for socialism among the workers. It is not
surprising that certain public circles in the Third Republic
understood sociology almost as a synonym of socialism.

In the 1890s the influence of Marxism began to grow among

209
14-1147

certain sections of the French working-class movement. Transla-
tions of the works of Engels, Karl Kautsky, and Labriola ap-
peared. Durkheim’s response to socialism’s attraction for many
students was his lectures of 1895-96 on socialism. He intended,
starting with Saint-Simon, to survey the theories of Proudhon,
Lassalle, and Marx, but was unable to carry out his plan com-
pletely.

He recognised socialism as a movement of great social sig-
nificance. Socialists, especially Saint-Simon and Marx, he
wrote, recognised that modern society differed radically from
the traditional type of social order, and had formulated a pro-
gramme of social reorganisation so as to overcome the crisis
caused by the transition from the old to the new. Socialism was
an ideal that grew from a feeling of justice, and of sympathy for
the poverty of the working class. ‘It was above all a plan for the
reconstruction of societies, a program for a collective life
which does not exist as yet ... and which is proposed to men as
worthy of their preference’.? Socialism was a ‘cry of grief, and
sometimes of anger, uttered by men who felt most keenly our
collective malaise’.*

In defining socialism as a practical doctrine requiring con-
scious subordination of all economic functions to society’s
guiding centres,> he mistakenly interpreted it as an exclusively
economic theory that allegedly paid no attention to moral pro-
blems.

Although he recognised that many socialists, and espe-
cially Karl Marx, had linked their fate inseparably with defence
of the interests of the working class, Durkheim all the same sug-
gested that this was a secondary matter not inherent in their
theories. He rejected the need to abolish classes, and did not
consider the thesis of ‘class conflict’ to be important in princi-
ple, since improvement of the workers’ lot would come of itself
as a simple consequence of reform of the social system.

In making the economic content of socialism an absolute,
and criticising it on that basis for underestimating the moral
factor, Durkheim considered communism (early communist
doctrines) as an exclusively moral doctrine preaching asceticism,
as a dream that expressed the nobility of its creators’ mind and
because of that had an attractive force. But this teaching, in his
view, did not correspond to the needs of society since prosperi-

210

a

ty and wealth should be the social ideal, and not universal re-
straint and poverty.

Durkheim’s misunderstanding of scientific socialism was due
to his class position. Optimistically evaluating the possibilities of
capitalism’s development of the whole, he counted the social
phenomena on whose soil scientific socialism had grown as a
‘social pathology’ that could be ‘cured’ by reforms, and reduced
the social problem to a moral one.

His socio-political position had a conciliatory, utopian char-
acter. His efforts as an ideologist and theorist were directed to
looking for a third way between clerical royalism and socialism,
and to substantiating social reformism. The quest was not
crowned by any serious results.

2. The Subject-Matter of Sociology and Its Place
Among the Other Social Sciences

Among the general conditions needed to convert sociology into
an independent science, Durkheim saw the existence of a spe-
cial subject-matter studied exclusively by a science, and a cor-
responding method of investigation. Sociology, he suggested,
should study social reality which had special qualities inherent
only in it. The elements of social reality were social facts, the
aggregate of which was society. These facts constituted the sub-
ject-matter of sociology.

In his definition, a social fact is ‘any manner of action, fixed
or not, susceptible to exert an external constraint on the indivi-
dual ... and having its own existence independent of its indivi-
dual manifestations’.° The individual found, from birth, ready-
made laws and customs, rules of conduct, religious beliefs and
rituals, language, and a monetary system that operated indepen-
dently of him/her. These ways of thinking, acting, and feeling
existed independently and objectively.

Another characteristic of social facts, viz., the pressure exert-
ed on individuals, and compelling them to a certain action, was
a consequence of the facts’ objectivity. Durkheim wrote in ex-
planation of this that everybody experienced social compulsion
or coercion. Legal and moral rules, for example, could not be
broken without the individual feeling the whole weight of uni-

211

versal disapproval. It was exactly the same with other types of
social facts.

In a certain sense Durkheim counterposed facts, understood
as forms of social being, or facts of a morphological order, to
the facts of collective consciousness, which he called the col-
lective ideas that were the essence of morality, religion, and law.

Social morphology should study the structure and form of
the parts of society, or its ‘anatomical structure’, constituted
by demographic and ecological facts, ie., the ‘substratum’ of
collective notions.

Morphological facts included the number and character of
the principal elements of society, the means of combining them,
their degree of cohesion and solidarity, the territorial distribu-
tion of population, the character of communications, the form
of housing, etc.” They constituted, as it were, the ‘material’,
quantitative aspect of society, while the facts of collective con-
sciousness, i.e., collective ideas, were its spiritual, qualitative as-
pect.

Durkheim called morphological facts and collective ideas
‘the inner social environment’, which was characterised by the
number of individuals per unit of area (‘material density’) and
the degree of concentration of the ‘mass’ (‘dynamic density’),
which was expressed in the intensity of individuals’ social inter-
course, and the frequency of their contacts, which determined
the ‘quality of life as a whole’.

The contradiction in Durkheim’s answers to these matters is
a clear example of his philosophical inconsistency. Thus, when
pointing out the determinant influence of the social environ-
ment, he included both material and ideal facts in the concept.
But when stressing the capacity of collective consciousness to
produce other social facts, and even to create society, he ascribed
a self-sufficient, autonomous character to it, never posing the
question of the limits or relativity of this autonomy. His use of
the concept of a ‘material substratum’ of social affairs by no
means signified an approximation to understanding the actual
material foundation of society, its basis. His depreciation of the
importance of economic relations, and interpretation of them as
relations of benefit and interest, led him to a miscomprehension
of the role of production labour. Like most pre-Marxian ma-
terialists he considered matter a synonym for a physical body,

and therefore could not see any ‘matter’ in society other than
what was embodied in ecological, demographic, and technol-
ogical facts.

At the same time one must note his striving to put sociology
on a firmer foundation than that of psychology, and to find a
starting point for a sociological explanation of the diversity of
social phenomena.

Inconsistency apart, the chief drawback of Durkheim’s treat-
ment of the problem of social facts as the subject-matter of so-
ciology, was his lack of understanding of the importance of in-
vestigating their epistemological nature, which led, when he was
making a theoretical analysis of such a phenomenon as religion,
to errors of principle.

In Durkheim’s conception sociology had a central place in
the social sciences. Its job was not only to investigate social
facts, but to equip all the other social sciences with a method
and a theory on which investigations in various fields of social
life could be based. The different social sciences were sections
or branches as it were of sociology that studied collective ideas
in their concrete (legal, moral, religious, economic) form.
Spokesmen of the different disciplines should be united by a
common point of view on the character of social facts, the com-
mon criteria for evaluating them, and the general method of in-
vestigation. Only then would sociology cease to be an abstract,
metaphysical science, and the works of social scientists cease to
be monographs unconnected with one another and lacking cog-
nitive value. Durkheim extended his plan of ‘sociologisation’ to
the theory of knowledge and logic, and also to the non-philo-
sophical sciences (history, ethnography, economics, etc.).
Philosophy, too, was subject to reconstruction on the basis of
sociology and its data.®

In Durkheim’s understanding the relation of sociology and
philosophy was expressed in a contradictory formula: on the
one hand, a requirement of separating sociology from phi-
losophy; on the other, a search for new forms of the links be-
tween them. He considered that sociology, when hived off from
philosophy, got a chance to concern itself with its own pro-
blems, viz., social reality as such. What he had in mind was its
separation from traditional idealistic metaphysics far removed
from understanding the reality. One of the end results of the

213

development of social research was, in his view, the creation of
a sociologically substantiated philosophy, since a really scienti-
fic answer to the most difficult metaphysical problems (on the
nature of morality, religion, etc.) was only possible, as he con-
sidered, on the basis of sociological studies. The tasks that had
previously been unsuccessfully tackled from an objective-ideal-
ist (theological) or subjective-idealist (psychological) positions
were resolvable by sociology when the explanation of essentially
social phenomena was given an empirical basis. The sociological
point of view should thus alter philosophy and rid it of its spe-
culative character. That posing of the problem of the relation of
sociology and philosophy, and of sociology’s place among
other social sciences, was not encountered in any non-Marxian
school of sociology, and contained several true ideas. But, hav-
ing posed the problem of the unity of the sciences and of a syn-
thesis of their results, Durkheim could neither satisfactorily con-
ceptualise them nor, furthermore, cope with the tasks that stem-
med in practice from his conception.

3. ‘Sociologism’ as a Theory of Society

Two main tendencies can be traced in Durkheim’s theoretical
conceptions. The first of them, naturalism, stemmed from an
understanding of society and its laws and patterns on the analo-
gy of nature and its natural laws, and was linked with the tradi-
tions of the philosophy of the French Enlightenment. The se-
cond trend, ‘social realism’, was a conception of society as a rea-
lity of a special kind (sui generis), distinct from all other forms
of reality (physical, chemical, biological, psychological). It was
linked with the conceptions of society developed by the tradi-
tionalists (Bonald, de Maistre) and by Saint-Simon and Comte.

Social realism, as a theory of society, is a part of Durkheim’s
‘sociologism’.”

On the theoretical plane ‘sociologism’, in contrast to indivi-
dualist conceptions, affirmed the principle of the specific nature
and autonomy of social reality and, furthermore, of its primacy
and superiority over individuals. By comparison with the indivi-
dual society was treated as a reality richer in content. On the
methodological plane the following were characteristic of ‘so-

214

ciologism’: the principle of an objective scientific approach to
social phenomena; the requirement of explanation of the so-
cial by other social phenomena and, in that connection, the
need of a critique of biological and psychological reductionism.

‘Sociologism’ was directly connected with the answer to the
basic philosophical question. Durkheim recognised the connec-
tion of mind and matter and pointed out the origin of social
consciousness from the ‘social milieu’. Because social life, he
wrote,

is partly independent of the organism, however, it does not follow
that it depends upon no natural cause, and that it must be put out-
side nature. But all these facts whose explanations we cannot find
in the constitution of tissues derive from properties of the social
milieu.'°

The nub of his conception was a striving to include moral and
religious phenomena in the sphere of natural ones that had ‘con-
ditions and causes’ but at the same time retain their specific
character. That led to assigning qualities to the public mind, or
social consciousness, of a kind that converted it into an almost
independent phenomenon generating social life as such.

Durkheim drew a sharp line between individual and collec-
tive consciousness. The group, he wrote, thought, felt, and acted
quite differently than its members would if they were isolated;
if one started with the latter, one would not be able to under-
stand what was happening in the group.’? He called collective
or general consciousness a psychic type of society with its own
mode of development, not reducible to a material basis, its own
properties and its own conditions of existence. In trying to ex-
press the dynamic aspect of the collective mind and its spon-
taneous, unregulatable character, Durkheim introduced ‘collec-
tive idea’ to designate emotionally coloured ideas and
beliefs; in their origin, and by their content, they were social,
collective.

When Durkheim was examining the genesis of collective, ge-
neral consciousness, he based himself on the idea of the con-
tinuous development of nature and the ‘creative synthesis’ of
the simple and complex.

He interpreted the relations of the individuals in society as

215

ones of association, as a result of which a new quality arose—
social life as a process of activity.

The theory that a new quality, social life, arose during the in-
tercourse and association of individuals from the facts of in-
teraction and communication has been called ‘associationist
realism’ in many studies of Durkheim.??

Rejecting belief in society as a transcendental hypostasised
and substantial whole, and warning against such an interpreta-
tion of his conception, Durkheim wrote that a belief or a social
practice was capable of existing independently of its individual
expressions. He would obviously, therefore, not dream of saying
that society was possible without individuals, which is manifest-
ly absurd.'? By the ‘independence of society’ Durkheim meant
only its objectivity in relation to the individual, and its special,
qualitative, specific nature, and not othersidedness or superna-
turalness. In using this expression, Durkheim did not of course
mean to hypostatise collective consciousness. He did not recog-
nise a more substantial soul in society than in the individual.'*
He interpreted the relation of society and the individual as a
relation of the whole and its parts, constantly citing a chemical
whole (as a synthesis of its component elements) as an example.

However, along with the associationist aspect, there is
another, not unimportant side to Durkheim’s conception of so-
ciety. When pointing out the earthly, social roots of religion, he
called God society. He wanted, by employing the concepts of
God and society as synonyms, to suggest new ideas correspond-
ing to the criteria of rationality and secularism instead of de-
cayed religious notions. When stressing the sanctity of society
and attributing features of spirituality and hyperspirituality to
it, he wanted to express the idea of its moral superiority to in-
dividuals.

But, by attributing features of sanctity to society, he thereby
painted it in traditional religious colours. His naturalism and ra-
tionalism were not only fully combined with a religious-spiri-
tualist terminology but also with an idealist interpretation of
social life.

Durkheim’s views on society evolved. In his early works he
insisted on a close relationship between collective conscious-
ness and the social milieu. Accordingly, as the size of groups,
the density and mobility of their individual components, and

216

the relation between individual minds and the collective mind
changed the general beliefs sanctioned by the latter, also altered.
Later he began to consider collective consciousness a vital
nexus of society as a whole.

Society, he declared, was an ‘ensemble of ideas, beliefs, and
sentiments of all kinds that were realised by individuals’. 5

Historical idealism (of which this definition of society is a
clear formulation) led Durkheim almost always to interpret so-
cial relations as moral ones; and he called ideals the ‘spirit of
society’ and its essence.

Durkheim’s pupil Célestin Bouglé justly pointed out that
there was no monism in positivism, especially in Durkheim’s
positivism.'® Durkheim regarded society and its consciousness
as single-plane phenomena; in his conception they were not only
interconnected and mutually conditioned, but could also alter
the etymological sequence during explanation. Now collective
ideas were the product of society, and now society, on the con-
trary, was a product of collective ideas—this did not phase Durk-
heim; on the contrary, it seemed an attribute of scientific char-
acter to him. And as Bouglé has remarked, there one met ‘a cen-

tral point of Durkheim’s philosophy’.

4. The Rules of Sociological Method

| The methodology of sociological research that Durkheim devel-
oped helped make him a leading spokesman of positivism.
| In setting himself the task of establishing sociology theoreti-
cally and methodologically, he tried to tie its methodological
principles up closely with his conception of its subject-matter
as facts of a special kind, i.e., social. In that he continued the
traditions of positivism, in the sense that he systematically
examined the tules of the gathering of initial empirical data,
of examining the relations empirically established between them
and the evidence for hypotheses put forward. He shared the na-
turalistic principles of positivists, striving to build sociology on
the example of the natural sciences with the inductive methods
and principles of objective observation characteristic of them.
His main opponent on these matters was psychologism, in par-
ticular the method of introspection typical of the time.

417
Zi/

The first rule, which in Durkheim’s view should be to ensure
an objective approach to social reality, was to consider social
facts as things. 1°

To treat social phenomena as ‘things’ meant to recognise
their existence independent of the subject and to study them
objectively in the way a natural science studied its subject-mat-
ter. In applying the principles of methodological objectivism to
the study of collective ideas, whose nature was ideal, ‘hyper-
spiritualistic’, Durkheim ran into several very complicated ques-
tions. Since collective states of consciousness could not be ob-
served directly, they could only, he claimed, be judged indirect-
ly from the objective facts about various forms of behaviour and
according to the expression of collective consciousness in the
form of social institutions. Sociology thus dealt with the objec-
tivisation of social consciousness and with its expression in ob-
jective indicators. Durkheim considered, for example, that the
figures of statistics helped bring out ‘trends’ of everyday life
inaccessible in any other way, that the proverbs of primitive
peoples brought out their customs, and that works of art dis-
closed historically changing tastes, etc.)°

Since it was possible to apply the method of indirect obser-
vation in the physical sciences, it was also possible to do so in
sociology. But the aim of science did not boil down, according
to Durkheim, to a description and ordering of social facts by
means of observed objective indicators. They helped establish
deeper causal connections and laws. The existence of a law in
the social world was evidence of the scientific character of so-
ciology (which brought out this law), and of its affinity to the
other sciences. It was laws that formed the subject-matter of the
social science’s research, Durkheim considered, and he linked
the concept of law closely with the principle of determinism.
He regarded fact and law as correlative categories that reflected
various levels of the links of reality. A fact was an external
manifestation of a law; a law was the general inner basis of a
fact.

While trying to achieve as great objectivity as possible in the
gathering of empirical material, Durkheim stressed that it was
necessary, in the first phase of an investigation, to take as the
initial facts only those phenomena that could be directly ob-
served.

218

He saw in his requirement of starting from sensations, and
borrowing elements of their initial definitions?® from sense
data, a guarantee of avoiding preconceptions or vulgar notions
and phantoms that distorted the true aspect of things, and that
were taken for the things themselves.”' In continuing the battle
against these ‘phantoms’ begun by Francis Bacon, Durkheim
demanded that confused, vague ideas, prejudices, and emotions
be banished from science.

Facts, he claimed, should be classified independently of the
scholar and of the waverings of his mind, and be based on the
nature of the things. Hence his requirement to give objective
definitions of concepts by distinguishing the features common
for a whole class of phenomena.

Durkheim was aware of the need of a theoretical definition
of scientific concepts, and demanded that they meet the cri-
terion of unity and not be based just on one isolated fact. But
his clearly expressed predilection for inductivism and empiri-
cism did not help him analyse the modes of formation of theoret-
ical scientific concepts more fully, and to show how their con-
nections with scientific theory were manifested.

His desire to find the objective patterns of social phenomena
determined the high value he put on the application of statistics
in sociology. Statistical patterns of marriages, variations in the
birth rate, of the number of suicides, and much else that wholly
depended, at first glance, on individual causes, seemed to him to
be.the best evidence that these patterns manifested some collec-
tive state.

Durkheim considered theoretical substantiation of the pos-
sibility of a scientific explanation of social facts to be one of the
most important problems; in tackling it, he differentiated two
kinds of analysis, causal and functional, and applied that in so-
ciological research.

A sociological explanation, according to him, was a causal
one, the essence of which was analysis of the dependence of a
social phenomenon on the social milieu. He criticised all other
attempts to explain social life from that angle, viz. Mill’s psy-
chological reductionism, Comte’s explanation of social evolu-
tion as the consequence of man’s inherent drive to develop his
own nature, and utilitarian theories, especially the Spencerian
conception.

219

Durkheim borrowed the concept of function from biology; it
meant that there was a relation of correspondence between a
given physiological process and some need of the organism as a
whole. Translating this thesis into social terms, he claimed that
the function of a social phenomenon or institution was to adjust
the correspondence between an institution and a certain need of
society as a whole, for example, to ‘ask what the function of
the division of labor is, is to seek for the need which it sup-
plies’.??

His interpretation of function as an objective connection be-
tween a phenomenon and a certain state of society as a whole
was quite justified. A function thus depended not only on the
objective features of the phenomenon performing it but also
expressed the idea of connection or relation.

Durkheim did not succeed in developing the method of
functional analysis to the end, however, since he experienced
great theoretical difficulties in a number of cases. He could not,
for example, put forward and substantiate a theoretical criterion
of the truth of the conception of social phenomenon, although
he repeatedly pointed out mistakes in the vulgar interpretation
of some social institution and its function.

Durkheim considered that only one of the rules for estab-
lishing causes developed by Mill was applicable to sociology,
viz., the method of concomitant changes. If it was established
that two types of phenomena were constantly in one and the
same relations and constantly changed, as it were, in parallel,
there were grounds for suggesting that there was a causal link
between them. But he suggested that a constancy of connec-
tions between phenomena was not sufficient in order to ascer-
tain a causal dependence, since there were links that could be
very stable but were not causal. Correlations like that were
formed through both types of interconnected phenomena being
the consequence of some common cause not involved in the cor-
relation.

Durkheim endeavoured to study how reliable knowledge of a
cause could be obtained, and how a causal relation could be
demonstrated. If it was impossible, when studying phenomena
in one society, to define their cause reliably, by singling it out
from a host of other causes and analysing its action separately,
this might be done by studying similar phenomena in other

220

societies in which the operative factors could be observed partial-
ly isolated.

Durkheim attached much more importance to comparative
research than Comte did. He claimed that it helped decide all
the principal theoretical tasks of sociology since only by com-
paring one and the same phenomena in different societies could
the general and the specific in them be discovered that deter-
mined their diversity and. their development in different direc-
tions. For those considerations he included causal analysis in the
comparative method of research. After a relationship had been
established between two social phenomena it was necessary to
clarify their importance and distribution by means of a com-
parative study, and to define whether they occurred in different
social conditions or only in a certain society, or in a certain
common state of different societies.

The striving to avoid descriptiveness and to develop a theory
and methodology of sociological explanation were very positive
elements of ‘sociologism’, just like its methodological objectiv-
ism and orientation on the natural sciences.

Durkheim’s structural-functional analysis was based on an
analogy between society and an organism as a highly perfected
system of organs and functions. From the analogies with an or-
ganism he deduced the concept of a normal type of society,
concepts of a norm and pathology that he later employed to in-
terpret such phenomena as crime, crisis, and other forms of so-
cial disorganisation.

Those social functions that stemmed from the conditions of
a social organism’s existence were normal, according to him.
Crime and other social ailments, although harming society and
causing repugnance, were normal in the sense that they were
rooted in certain social conditions and supported useful, neces-
sary social relations.

The external, directly perceptible objective sign that made
it possible to distinguish the two sorts of factors (normal and
pathological) from one another, was (in Durkheim’s view) the
degree of their universality or commonness. Generality was an in-
dication of social health.”> A social fact, he wrote, was normal for
a certain social type considered as a definite phase of its develop-
ment, when it was produced in the average of societies of that
kind considered at the corresponding phase of their evolution.” *

221

The conception of the normal as a generality and the com-
mon led Durkheim not only to paradoxical conclusions but also
to relativism. He treated crime, for instance, which is met in all
or most societies, as a normal phenomenon. On the contrary,
however, he qualified such typical social phenomena as the in-
crease in the number of suicides at the end of the nineteenth
century, and certain types of economic crisis, as pathological.” §

Durkheim had a feeling of a need to base himself on a defi-
nite theory of society and historical development when speak-
ing of some ideal, optimum form of society in relation to which
deviant cases had to be regarded. But he could not substantiate
this form theoretically, which inevitably led him to relativism
in his appreciation of any social phenomenon.

Relativism could be avoided in the evaluation of various so-
cial phenomena by passing to the soil of objective criteria of
historical progress and by treating subjective criteria in accord-
ance with a general theory of the progressive development of
society. But, while rejecting the ideas of the evolutionists about
direct, linear development, Durkheim did not work out his own
consistent theoretical conception of history. Unlike the later
structural functionalists, who often avoided comparing the re-
quirements of the structural-functional approach and historical
(causal) analysis, he recognised both approaches as legitimate.
But his treatment of society as a harmonious unity complicated
. his understanding of the causes and driving forces of develop-
ment; the problem of them was unresolvable in principle from a
stance that made the social whole an absolute. The historical
method that Durkheim proposed to employ in research made it
a requirement to study the social environment as the main
source of changes and did not clarify the sense of the concept
itself in regard to history.

The development of causal and functional analysis in regard
to society was a fruitful and promising line. It was important
that Durkheim defended social determinism at a time when a
tendency had grown up in social studies to interpret the prin-
ciple of causality in a subjectivist spirit.

Durkheim’s orientation on comparative analysis as a neces-
sary requirement of sociological research was also very fruit-
ful. This research, in fact, often lacks scientific sense and mean-
ing when it has no historical perspective enabling it to compare

999

social phenomena in different societies and in various temporal
parameters. Characteristically, this requirement was forgotten
by the later structural functionalists.

One can conclude on the whole that Durkheim’s sociological
method has retained its significance to the present in that part
of it concerned with the main postulates of research. But
their realisation was limited and hampered subsequently by the
inadequate theoretical basis of ‘sociologism’.

5. Social Solidarity and the Division of Labour

The central problem of Durkheim’s work was social solidarity.
Its solution would have provided an answer to what links united
people in society. It was necessary to determine the nature and
function of social solidarity in modern ‘developed’ society in
contrast to primitive or traditional ones and to explain the his-
torical transition from one form of society to another.

Durkheim criticised the main sociological conceptions of
the factors uniting people in society. These factors could not
be the free play of individual interests (Spencer) or the state
(Comte, Tonnies). The force that created the social whole and
promoted its preservation in spite of centrifugal tendencies was
the division of labour. His main thesis was that the division of
labour, by which he understood professional or vocational spe-
cialisation, more and more performed the role that the common
consciousness sometimes did; it held social aggregates of the
highest types together in the main.” ©

Durkheim set himself the following tasks: (1) ‘to determine
the function of the division of labor, that is to say, what social
need it satisfies’; (2) ‘to determine, then, the causes and condi-
tions on which it is dependent’; (3) ‘to classify the principal ab-
normal forms’ since, in his opinion, in them ‘as in biology,
pathology wili help us more fully to understand physiology’.””

Division of labour was a sign of a highly developed society.
As a consequence of an ever increasing specialisation of work in-
dividuals were compelled to exchange their activity, to perform
mutually supplementing functions unwittingly constituting a
single whole. Solidarity in a developed society was a natural
consequence of the division of production roles. How, then, did

223

matters stand in archaic societies in which there was no division
of labour?

Starting from the ideas, typical of nineteenth-century socio-
logy, of the construction of two types of society between which
there was a historial continuity,?* Durkheim built a dichotomy
of societies with mechanical and organic solidarity as two links
in a single evolutionary chain.

He called the solidarity that prevailed in undeveloped, archaic
societies mechanical, on the analogy of the connection that exis-
ted between the molecules of inorganic substances (the mole-
cules all alike and connected in a purely mechanical way). Soli-
darity in such societies was determined by the similarity and like-
ness of the individuals comprising them, by the sameness of the
social functions performed by these individuals, and by the unde-
veloped nature of individual features. Mechanical solidarity was
possible through the absorption of individuality by the collective.

Durkheim found an objective indicator, a ‘visible symbol’ of
solidarity in law. Repressive law in which the force of the collec-
tive consciousness was expressed was characteristic of mechani-
cal solidarity; its task was to punish the individual strictly who
infringed custom or law.

He established a functional dependence between the strength
of the social ties characteristic of one type of solidarity or the
other, on the one hand, and the relative size (scope) of the col-
lective consciousness and its intensity and more or less definite-
ness, on the other.

Solidarity was stronger if the scope of collective conscious-
ness coincided with that of individual consciousnesses, and if
the collective consciousness was more intensive and more clearly
expressed. There was then no place for individual deviations and
the collective consciousness regulated the whole life of the indivi-
dual without a remainder, and collective authority was absolute.

In such cases the collective consciousness was wholly and
completely religious in its content. Anticipating his future
theory of religion Durkheim put forward a thesis that where a
group of people shared a strong conviction it inevitably took on
a religious character. The main feature of religious beliefs and
feelings was that they were ‘common to a certain number of
people living together, and that, besides they have an average
intensity that is quite heightened’.?? He thus identified the so-

224

>

cial and the religious: ‘everything social is religious; the two
words are synonyms’.?°

But religion, he said, embraced an ever diminishing part of
social life. Development of the division of labour, in which an
increasing number of the most varied functions was displayed,
was the principal, direct factor weakening the single collective
consciousness. Once people began to perform private special
functions in society, there was a weakening of social conscious-
ness which was functionally differentiated so as to correspond
to the ever increasing division of labour and more complex so-
cial organisation.

A developed society in which each individual performed
some one special function in accordance with the division of
social labour resembled an organism with its various organs;
Durkheim therefore called the new type of solidarity organic.
The division of labour determined the differences of individuals,
who developed individual, personal capacities and talents in
accordance with their professional or vocational role. Each
individual was now a personality. Consciousness that each de-
pended on the other, that all were connected by a single system
of social relations created by the division of labour, evoked a
feeling of dependence on one another, of solidarity, and of
one’s link with society. And, ‘since the division of labor be-
comes the chief source of social solidarity, it becomes, at the
same time, the foundation of the moral order’.?!

Organic solidarity corresponded to so-called restitutive law,
whose function was to review ‘the past in order to reinstate it,
as far as possible, to its normal form’.??

Given organic solidarity, collective consciousness acquired
new forms and changed its content. It became smaller in scope,
and only a very narrow part of developed societies; its intensity
and degree of determinacy were also reduced. ‘The role of col-
lective conscience becomes small as labor is divided.’ ?

Collective consciousness was more and more converted, as re-
gards its content, into a secular, rationalist one, oriented to the
individual. At the same time Durkheim denied that ‘the com-
mon conscience is threatened with total extinction’.?* ‘We erect
a cult in behalf of personal dignity,’ he wrote, ‘which, as every
strong cult, already has its superstitions. It is thus, if one wishes,
a common cult’.?°

15-1147

Durkheim stressed and distinguished an aspect of solidarity
in the division of labour in modern society, pushing the problem
of the antagonism of labour and capital, the ‘forced character’
of labour, and the moral and economic crises of society into the
background. When he analysed these matters at the end of The
Division of Labor, he was inclined to treat them as the result
of inadequate regulation of the relations between the main
classes, and as an unwholesome element in the life of society,
which he regarded as a united society on the whole that retained
the unity and wholeness of preceding epochs. According to him
the division of labour was exactly the mechanism that, in mo-
dern society (which had largely lost the cementing force of the
general, religious consciousness), created the desired social ties
and class solidarity that allegedly compensated for all the short-
comings associated with narrow specialisation. The concept of
solidarity thus became the axis around which the whole analysis
of the division of labour and definition of its functions turned.

Durkheim’s main thesis, that the division of labour naturally
generated solidarity, stemmed from his defining it not in rela-
tion to some class or other of a certain socio-economic system,
but only in respect of collective or general consciousness.

He regarded solidarity as the highest moral principle, the sup-
reme value, allegedly universal and recognised by all members of
society. Since the need for public order, harmony, and solidari-
ty was counted as moral by everyone, the division of labour it-
self was also moral. Durkheim’s conception thus served to de-
fine the conditions of the maintenance of society; that was the
chief task he set sociological science. The generality of the re-
cognition of social solidarity as the highest value was only
postulated, of course, and not proved.

Durkheim considered the cause of the division of labour to
be growth of population, which governed the intensity of so-
cial life. An increase in ‘physical density’ and in the ‘size’ of
societies was inextricably linked, in his view, with an increase in
‘moral or dynamic density’, i.e., in the level of social interac-
tion, which led in the end to division of labour.

But how? The struggle for existence increased with growth
of population; in those conditions division of labour was the
sole means of preserving and maintaining a given society, of
creating social solidarity of a new type, and of giving society

226

the chance to develop in a progressive direction.

According to Durkheim the causal relation was neither sim-
ple nor linear, but included a host of variables; the causal expla-
nation of social facts should not completely ignore the value
aspect of social life, although it could not be based entirely on
it. The fact that he insisted on a postulate to explain the social
by the social, did not allow him to go beyond stating an interac-
tion between factors and to establish the true causal dependence
of phenomena. That could only be done through a deeper ana-
lysis, since only an approach to society as the interaction of
different aspects of a single socio-economic formation made it
possible to bring out the dependence between them as one be-
tween a determinant cause and derivative consequences.

Durkheim, of course, started from the philosophical princi-
ple that phenomena of one level do not arise from phenomena
of another. That orientation ruled out in principle the possibility,
when explaining social phenomena, of appealing to phenomena
of another, higher order, to more fundamental phenomena, i.e.,
to the economic relations of society. He therefore failed to give
a properly causal explanation of the division of labour. He only
touched on the interaction of the different factors within the
limits of the social sphere, without rising to the level at which
the true causes of the division of labour could only be found.
These had to be sought first of all in the conditions of the eco-
nomic affairs of class society, and in the concrete character of
its relations of production, which determined the division of la-
bour. Durkheim denied the firmness and stability of economic
ties, and their capability of creating society, determining its
character, and ensuring duration of existence. He therefore did
not study the division of labour (which he identified with
growth of specialisation) from the economic angle, but from a
moral standpoint, considering it the principal factor creating so-
cial solidarity, i.e., society.

6. ‘Abnormal’ Forms of the Division of Labour.
Personality and Society

Durkheim was a witness of the mounting crisis phenomena in
both the economic and spiritual affairs of society. He called the

227
15*

growth of contradictions between labour and capital and the
anarchy of production ‘abnormal’ forms of the division of la-
bour caused by too high rates of social development. In the third
part of The Division of Labor, devoted to investigation of these
‘abnormal’ forms, he distinguished the following ‘pathological
forms’ of capitalism: anomy, social inequality, and inadequate
organisation of the division of labour. He sought an explanation
of anomy, i.e., the social state in which there was an absence of
clear-cut moral regulation of individuals’ behaviour, in lack of
development of rules governing relations between social func-
tions that are not adapted to one another.*°® That was displayed
particularly clearly during an economic or trade crisis in the
antagonism of labour and capital. With growth of the market
economy production was becoming uncontrollable and unregu-
latable. With the development of large-scale industry relations
between employers and workers were changing. On the one
hand, the needs of the latter were increasing; on the other,
machines were more and more replacing people. ‘The worker
is regimented, separated from his family throughout the day’.?”
And, ‘as these changes have been accomplished with extreme ra-
pidity, the interests in conflict have not yet had the time to be
equilibrated’.>* Growth of large-scale industry was breaking up
the unity of the small enterprise, creating two big classes, capital
and labour, which were antagonistically related (Durkheim did
not deny that).

For him the normal state of society should be characterised
by a development of economic planning and normative regula-
tion of economic relations through production corporations. In
that case he identified the normal with the optimum and best.

The ailments of capitalism Durkheim described (such as unre-
gulated competition, unrestrained by anything; class conflict;
monotony of work and degradation of labour power) he charac-
terised as the pains of too rapid growth of production and divi-
sion of labour, and as temporary side-effects of natural evolu-
tion.

He also considered inequality, which entailed deviation from
organic solidarity, an ‘abnormal form’ of the division of labour.
Any ‘outward inequality’, created, for example, by the inheri-
tance of property, menaced organic solidarity, so that the latter
was only possible given elimination of inequality and attainment

228

of justice through ‘the distribution of natural talents’.>°

Equality of opportunities, he claimed, was prevented by the
class system, which deprived the broad masses of the chance to
occupy a social position in accordance with their capabilities.
That led to an unjust exchange of services.

If one class of society is obliged, in order to live, to take any price
for its services, while another can abstain from such action thanks
to resources at its disposal which, however, are not necessarily due
to any social superiority, the second has an unjust advantage over
the first at law.*°

(Durkheim had in mind superiority of capabilities—Z. O. ).

Durkheim thought that ‘abnormal’ forms of the division of
labour could be overcome by peaceful settlement of conflicts,
reducing struggle and competition to an acceptable scale, estab-
lishing a code of rules rigorously regulating the relations of class-
es, and the introduction of justice and equality in the external
conditions, i.e., equality of social opportunities and remunera-
tion of all according to their services.

He did not imagine a society in which private property and
inequality of all kinds would be fully abolished. He considered
they would exist, although the relation between them would
change. Access to material goods would be regulated by indivi-
duals’ natural capacities and talents.

The last of the ‘abnormal’ forms of the division of labour
pointed out by Durkheim arose when the worker’s professional
activity was insufficient because of lack of co-ordination of ac-
tions.

Solidarity of social organisation grew, in his view, when la-
bour was more intense and organised. That utopian thesis was re-
futed, however, by the course of the development of capitalist
production in the twentieth century. Neither ‘scientific organi-
sation of work’ nor any of the other ways of intensifying it have
led to class solidarity of antagonistic society. Durkheim’s con-
cept of the division of labour itself was different from Marx’s.
The source of class conflict needs to be sought in the division of
labour between the classes of society in accordance with their
relation to the means of production, as Marx suggested, rather
than through its analysis as specialisation of professional func-

9990

Z

tions. Whether ownership of the means of production is inherit-
ed or newly acquired is a secondary matter; the main thing is
that property relations determine all the other relations of capi-
talist society and underlie the antagonism of labour and capital.

The ways that Durkheim outlined for overcoming the defects
of capitalism were unreal and utopian, though he counted less
and less on natural development of solidarity through the divi-
sion of labour itself, and more and more sharply raised the ques-
tion of curing capitalism’s ulcers, first by posing the task or re-
organising society within the limits of the capitalist system and
then relying on moral education in the spirit of the correspond-
ing values and ideals.

Durkheim’s answer to the broader, sociological problem of
the relation of society and the individual was also based on an
analysis of the contradictions of capitalism. His view was that
society could not develop and flourish if the human personality
was oppressed, if a person performing a narrow vocational func-
tion was reduced to the level of a machine. Furthermore, the in-
dividual would inevitably be degraded if the economic and so-
cial functions of society were threatened. In that case he avoid-
ed the typical dichotomy of the nineteenth century expressed
in posing the question of the relationship of the individual and
society in such a way as necessarily to recognise the priority of
one of its aspects. The individual and society, he considered,
were in relations of mutual dependence, each being interested in
the development and prosperity of the other. The happiness and
well-being of the individual, he suggested, depended on the state
of society; and all the more so when social affairs were more re-
gulated and consequently when the individual’s rights and free-
doms were guaranteed.

Durkheim took on the role of a denouncer of the inevitable
moral evil arising from the specialisation and differentiation of
industry. When a worker ‘every day ... repeats the same move-
ments with monotonous regularity, but without being interested
in them, and without understanding them’,*! he is converted
into an inert wheel driven by an external force.

In Durkheim’s view the conversion of a person into an appen-
dage of the machine could not be moderated or smoothed over
by granting workers universal education, or developing an in-
terest in art or literature in them, because familiarisation with

230

culture would make the narrow limits of their specialisation
even more intolerable.

How, then, to eliminate the contradiction between the divi-
sion of labour, which was being increased by the specialisation
of the worker’s function, and the needs of the development of
his personality and individuality? The division of labour, accord-
ing to Durkheim, did not in itself entail negative consequences;
they arose only in exceptional, abnormal circumstances. There-
fore ‘it is necessary and it is sufficient for it to be itself, for no-
thing to come from without to denature it’.*? That was possib-
le when workers’ consciousness of the goal, of solidarity with
others, and of the social need of their labour gave it a special con-
tent, made it not only tolerable but even desirable. An impor-
tant condition of workers’ joint, agreed activity was that the
functions they fulfilled should correspond to their capabilities
and inclinations. When the accord between individuals’ capabili-
ties and the kind of activity assigned to them was broken, so-
ciety became sick.

While explaining the origin of social crises so naively, Durk-
heim insisted at the same time that ‘differences which original-
ly separated these classes must have disappeared or grown
less’.*? The differentiation of society should rest on advantages
that were due to the individual capabilities of everyone, and not
on social privileges.

Equality, justice, and freedom were thus, in his views, the
basis of a social system of the highest type of organisation, to
which modern industrial society approximated. So, in the
period of the crisis of capitalism and of the wide spread of so-
cialist ideology, he was again repeating old capitalist slogans.

Society consists of moral ties, conscious striving for an ideal,
and moral relations that can and should be consciously regulat-
ed—such were the cornerstones of Durkheimian reformism. In
affirming that ‘this work of justice will become ever more com-
plete as the organised type develops’,** i.e., in developed capi-
talist society, he apologetically ascribed socialist features to it.
He considered it truly possible to consciously control social
processes. Hence his practical recommendations

to suppress useless tasks to distribute work in such a way that each
one will be sufficiently occupied, and consequently, to increase the

231

functional activity of each worker. Thus, order will be achieved at
the same time that work is more economically managed.**

Durkheim’s answer to the problem of the relation of the in-
dividual and society was distinguished by his not idealising the
past and seeing the sources and possibilities of the development
of individuality in progressive development of the division of
labour. While the individual’s ‘liberty is only apparent and his
personality borrowed” ® in the initial stages of organisation, he
gets the chance in a higher stage to become harmonious and
whole by freely developing his/her capabilities. Development of
the personality ‘in depth’ connected with narrow specialisation
was no less important than the development ‘in breadth’ that
bordered on diletantism. A person acquired, through associa-
tion with other people, what he lost through narrow specialisa-
tion. While not noting the exploiter character of work that caused
alienation of the individual, and while linking the difficulties
experienced by the specialised worker only with temporary,
unfavourable conditions, Durkheim believed that the general
ideals of fraternity and solidarity and awareness of the com-
mon goal of all workers compensated their inevitable losses.

His aim was to improve capitalist society and not to recon-
struct it radically. In spite of elements of a new approach to se-
parate social phenomena, he therefore did not go beyond
Comte, concentrating attention on moral problems and improv-
ing the legal and moral regulation of social relations.

7. Application of the Principles of ‘Sociologism’
to Study of the Causes of Suicide

The problem of suicide, to study of which Durkheim devoted a
special monograph, attracted his attention for many reasons.
There was a clearly circumscribed group of facts that could be
easily defined.*” Instead of abandoning himself to metaphysical
speculation about social phenomena, the sociologist could find
true laws that would reveal the possibilities of sociology better
than any dialectical argumentation.*® That was the first point.
Secondly, Durkheim regarded it his work to apply the main
principle of sociological method to empirical material: viz.,

232

|
)

study of a social fact as a ‘thing’, ie., recognition of the exis-
tence of a special reality external to the individual, a social reali-
ty that, while determining his behaviour, did not depend on his
will.

While basing himself on these theoretical, methodological
premisses, Durkheim rejected explanation of suicide by indivi-
dual, psychological motives, and claimed that social causes alone
were the explanatory factors. Suicide depended mainly on the
external causes that governed people and not on the individual’s
inner properties.

In bringing out the features of social crisis, Durkheim noted
that suicide was one of the forms that society’s collective ail-
ment took and that this was why it would help us to understand
the ailment. Determination of the causes of social illness, and
recommendations for overcoming it, seemed to him the best
means of consolidating the standing of sociology as a science.
A sociological explanation of the most individual action could
throw light on the forces that unite people, since suicide was a
clear example of disruption of social connections.

‘Sociologism’ was the essence of his explanation; all other
factors were regarded through its prism, including the individual
predisposition to suicide. In showing that the psychological mo-
tives of suicides, which often seemed their causes, were only an
individual, and moreover distorted reflection of general condi-
tions, Durkheim turned to study of the social milieu as the main
cause influencing a change in the percentage of suicides. He did
not completely reject the role of individual factors and the psy-
chic state and specific life circumstances of individual suicides,
but he stressed their secondary significance and their depend-
ence on general social causes and the state of society.

The percentage of suicides (the ratio of the number of sui-
cides to the total population), in the conception advanced by
Durkheim, was a function of several social variables: the rela-
tionship in religious, family, political, national, and other
groups. Starting from that he employed a technique of proof by
elimination (exclusion): he systematically examined and reject-
ed such non-social facts as the ‘psycho-organic predisposition’
of individuals (psychopatic state, racial and inherited factors),
features of the physical environment (climate, season, time of
day) and the processes of imitation. After that he examined the

433

effect of social causes and the way in which they operated, and
also the relations of the social and non-social factors.

Drawing on the official statistics, he discovered a number of
partial patterns: the percentage of suicides was higher in sum-
mer than in winter; men committed suicide more often than
women, old people more often than the young, soldiers more
often than the civil population, Protestants more often than
Catholics, the single and widowed more often that the married;
the percentage of suicides was higher in urban areas than in rural
ones, and so on. Leaving aside the individual qua individual, and
his incentives and ideas, he said, one had to ask immediately
what were the states of the different social milieux (religious,
family, political society, professional groups, etc.), as a func-
tion of which suicide varied.*? When studying the social factors,
Durkheim tried to determine which one, or what element of
it, was most closely linked with the percentage of suicides, in
accordance with the various logical rules, especially the rule of
attendant changes. What feature of religion, for example, had
the highest correlation with suicide? What was it about Catholi-
cism that made Catholics less prone to suicide than Protestants?

Having begun with investigation of how some creed influenc-
ed suicide, Durkheim showed the difference between Catholi-
cism and Protestantism from the angle both of dogma and of
rituals. Catholicism, as the older traditional system of beliefs
and rituals, had a much greater unity, strength of convictions,
and irreconcilability toward innovations that disturb the general
spirit, than Protestantism. That conditioned the greater cohe-
sion and solidarity of a religious group of Catholics, and hence,
consequently, the lower percentage of suicides among them.
Protestantism was associated with a decline of traditional be-
liefs and permeated with a spirit of freethinking and criticism.
Its possibility of uniting believers was less and the percentage of
suicides therefore higher.

This hypothesis helped explain many other social variables
connected with growth of the number of suicides. These varia-
bles were united by the degree of the individual’s social integra-
tion or social ties. Family, children, rural life were socially inte-
grating factors that kept the individual from feeling socially iso-
lated. Suicide, he suggested, varied inversely with the degree of
integration of the social groups the individual belonged to.°°

234

Factors of a non-social order could only affect the percent-
age of suicides indirectly. Durkheim employed a procedure in
which the non-social factor was included in the relation but
found that aspect of it that was most closely linked with a social
factor. The influence of biological, for example sex, differences,
became understandable when the relative social positions of
men and women, their ways of taking part in social and eco-
nomic affairs, the changing cycle of their social activity, etc.,
were analysed. When asserting that different types of suicide
could stem from different determinant causes,°’ and pointing
out the difficulty of compiling a morphological classification of
suicides that allowed for their characteristic types of peculiarity,
Durkheim decided to compare an aetiological classification cor-
responding to the causes of suicides.

Durkheim distinguished four types of suicide: egoistic, al-
truistic, anomic, and fatalistic. The first was caused by reasons
leading to the individual’s alienation from society which ceased
to exert a regulating effect on him. Rupture of social ties, ab-
sence of collective support, and a state of estrangement and iso-
lation caused a feeling of loneliness and emptiness, a sensation
of the tragedy of existence. Extreme individualism could be a
cause of suicides of that kind, but the soil generating it was a
sick society, ‘a kind of collective athenia’, and ‘social mal-
aise’.>? Social disorganisation and loss of social aims weakened
the ties binding the individual to society and consequently to
life. That general state was reflected in turn in a disintegration
of the social groups, religious, family or political, that directly
affected the individual.

The second type of suicide, the altruistic, was encountered
when personal interests were quite submerged by social ones,
and when the integration of the group was so great that the in-
dividual ceased to exist as an independent entity. Durkheim
included ancient customs in this, viz., suicide of the old and
sick, wives’ self-cremation after the death of husbands, the sui-
cide of slaves after their owner’s death, etc. Suicide of that sort
existed mainly in archaic societies.

The third type of suicide, the anomic, was encountered main-
ly during great social upheavals and economic crises, when the
individual lost the capacity to adjust to social changes.and new
social requirements, and lost his/her links with society. The

235

state of social anomy, by which Durkheim meant absence of
any rules and standards of behaviour, when the old hierarchy of
values had broken down and a new one had not taken shape, en-
gendered moral instability of separate individuals. When the
social structure tottered and was disorganised, some individuals
rose rapidly, while others lost their position in society; and
when social equilibrium was disturbed the number of suicides
increased. Durkheim characterised anomic suicide, which was
most often met in business circles, also from the angle of the
individual qualities of members of the commercial and industrial
world, and of their unbridled drive for gain which, not meeting
stiff regulation, grew excessively, disrupting moral and psychic
balance. A weakening or absence of social regulation, and dis-
ordered, unregulated human activity underlay anomic suicide.
When society was incapable of exerting the necessary influence
on a person, a lamentable outcome was inevitable.

The opposite of anomic suicide was fatalistic, which arose
as a result of increased control over the individual by the group,
when there was an excess of strict regulation. which became in-
tolerable to the individual. It was committed by subjects whose
futures were relentlessly walled in, and whose passions were vio-
lently checked by an oppressive discipline.* ?

Suicide was thus, in his view, a deliberate, conscious act com-
mitted by an individual, depending on the social discipline. The
measure of normal social behaviour was the normal social sub-
ject who respected the rule and was amenable to collective
authority.>4

The concepts ‘egoism—altruism’ and ‘anomy-—fatalism’ signi-
fied, in Durkheim’s conceptions, the collective force or propen-
sity that drove a person to suicide. He called these ‘forces’ ten-
dencies. Their intensity could be measured by the rate of sui-
cides. Collective forces or propensities could explain, accord-
ing to him, individual inclinations and predispositions to suicide
and not the other way round. The psychological motives of sui-
cide were individual, and often, moreover, distorted reflections
of the general conditions of the social milieu.

The most valuable feature of his analysis was his revealing
that the social essence of suicide was caused by crisis states of
capitalist society. His ideas gave a push to sociological studies
of ‘deviant behaviour’ as employed and developed, in particular,

by Robert Merton. But, having clearly defined the state of
moral demoralisation, moral and psychic disorganisation, and
decay of capitalist society, Durkheim did not bring out the true
reasons for this crisis, seeing in it too high rates of social change
with which the moral consciousness could not keep up, rather
than the essence of capitalist relations.* 5

The idea of a way out from the crisis through the creation of
production corporations to consolidate the moral order of so-
ciety was utopian.

One must also point out the abstract, formalistic character
of Durkheim’s typology of suicide. The essence of this social
phenomenon became distorted by his including various acts
that reflected the social standards of different socio-economic
formations in one group.

While paying principal attention to the social factor, Durk-
heim limited himself solely to pointing out its link with the
psychological factor. The idea that the individual’s decision was
determined by cultural requirements and standards, and by an
orientation in regard to human life and its value, was only ex-
pressed by Durkheim but not developed.

Despite the fact that his conceptions needed a more detailed
analysis of the relation of objective and subjective factors, the
main trend of his study gave an impulse to development of the
general question of the social conditioning of individual psycho!-
ogy.5¢

Durkheim paved the way for quantitative analysis in sociolo-
gy and blazed the way to develop its particular methods and
techniques (such as, for example, the method of successive in-
clusion of factors involved in interaction, the essence of which
lay in study and interpretation of the complex of relationships
between the numerous characteristics systematically included in
the relation studied earlier, study of this relation in widely vary-
ing contexts, etc.). Durkheim was not able to use such instru-
ments of scientific analysis as the correlation coefficient, the
concept of statistical interaction, the formalisation of analytical
procedures, etc., that are elementary from today’s standpoint.
In spite of that his work played a significant role in establishing
the sociological approach to suicide in contrast to the psycho-
pathological approach popular in his time, and rivalling the so-
ciological one to this day. And although many of his particular

conclusions were refuted or refined, the main idea has retained
its value to the present.

8. The Philosophical and
Sociological Conception of Morality

Since Durkheim considered society a moral unity of individuals,
he clung to the conceptual scheme of ‘sociologism’ in his treat-
ment of the nature, origin, and functions of morals, deducing
morality from social conditions, the social milieu, and the social -
structure in his specific understanding.

He originally regarded morality as a system of objective rules
of behaviour, the distinguishing feature of which was their com-
pulsory character to which the individual could not help submit-
ting. He considered duty to be the main attribute of morality.
Doing one’s duty made a person’s behaviour moral. Subsequent-
ly his interest was held by the voluntary aspect of morality, and
such features of it as desirability, acceptability, and the individ-
ual’s personal interest in moral values (objective goods, social
in their nature).

In trying to give a sociological explanation of both the origin
and functioning of moral phenomena, Durkheim reinterpreted
the modes of social determination of morals. In The Division of
Labor he had affirmed the principle of the historical develop-
ment of moral beliefs in accordance with morphological or
structural factors. Later he stressed the significance of periods
of mental uplift, ‘movement of enthusiasm’, and creative and in-
novating periods, which left their memory in the form of ideas,
ideals, and values.°’ These ideas, etc., were upheld and repro-
duced again and again through the organisation of festivals, pub-
lic religious and lay ceremonies, through preaching of all sort
and dramatic productions in which people could come together
and share in the same intellectual and moral life.>®

In any case Durkheim affirmed the social essence of morali-
ty. When stressing the sacred character of morality,°*? he ex-
plained it by both religion and morality having society as their
source and object, society which transcended the individual by
its force and authority. Society demanded personal unselfish-
ness and self-sacrifice—which were obligatory components of

238

morality. Kant, he said, postulated God because morality was
unintelligible without that hypothesis. He (Durkheim) postulat-
ed a society specifically distinct from individuals, because
morality was otherwise without object and duty without foun-
dation.®°

When linking morality with the social conditions giving rise
to it, Durkheim did not consider it possible to bring out and
substantiate a social ideal of a revolutionary character requiring
a radical breaking up of the social structure. Whenever morality
lagged behind the real conditions of society, it was only neces-
sary, he considered, to bring it into accord with the changed
structure, and no more.°!

The idea of the determination of morality by a stable social
structure led Durkheim to moral relativism. If all the forms of
morality were conditioned identically by the existing structure,
they were identically legitimate and there were no objective cri-
teria for recognising the superiority of any one of them.

Underlying a social crisis, which (he considered) was mainly
of a moral nature, was a change in the character and content of
the collective consciousness. A rapid change of standards and
values entailed a loss of past discipline and order in society. The
morality of individualism was not yet established as the main so-
cial value and content of the collective conscience. The organic
solidarity of modern society did not exclude a lack of rules of
behaviour, which led to a state of anomy, a moral vacuum, and
lack of standards. Modern society was therefore put into moral
disorder and experienced social strife. The way out of the crisis
was to strengthen moral regulation.

In Durkheim’s conception the state, which ‘thinks and acts’
for all the rest of society, was the main agency fulfilling the
function of ‘collective mind’ and defender of collective in-
terests. He treated the role of the state in the spirit of liberal-
ism, but foresaw the possibility of an excessive strengthening
and hypertrophy of its functions at the expense of the individ-
ual’s interests. The individual should be defended against ex-
treme state control by ‘secondary’ or intermediate social groups
(religious, production, etc.). In line with that Durkheim put for-
ward the idea of special, particular moral codes regulating the
behaviour of individuals as members of corresponding social
groups, argued the need for historical study of these codes, and

239

developed the idea of the relativity of the moral requirements
accepted in various professional circles. At the same time he
called for the establishing of a rigid hierarchy of moral rules ac-
cording to their social importance. Family, professional, and
civil morality shaped the hierarchical structure, at whose pinna-
cle were the universal values and ideas embodied in the state.
Durkheim reproduced the Comtean idea of the state as an agen-
cy of universal reconciliation and moral regulation of the in-
terests of all the members of society, irrespective of the social,
and class content of those interests.

The conception of an unconditional hierarchy of moral stand-
ards had a formal character and was aimed at maintaining sta-
bility of the social order.

In Durkheim’s view a person’s moral behaviour had three
main, inherent features: a sense of discipline, membership of a
group, and autonomy. He ascribed rather more significance to
moral discipline and control, in essence equating discipline and
morality. Only a human being was capable of consciously fol-
lowing discipline and only through that did freedom become
possible. The social essence of morality was embodied in the
feature of ‘group membership’, and the idea of conscious,
voluntary observance of social prescriptions in ‘autonomy’.

Durkheim connected his interpretation of the social func-
tions of morality directly with the theory of education. The aim
of education and upbringing was to mould a social being, to de-
velop those qualities and properties of a child’s personality that
society needed. It was the business of education to transform
the egoistic, unsocial creature that a child was initially, by the
most effective means, into another being, capable of leading a
moral and social life.

His treatment of the moral problems of modern times was
based on his anthropological theory, and the conception of the
duality of human nature, the conception of Homo duplex.

Man’s social nature, created through education (standards,
values, ideals) was contradicted by his biological nature (capabil-
ities, biological functions, impulses, and passions). That made
for incessant inner disquiet, and a sense of tension and alarm.
Only society’s controlling activity restrained man’s biological
nature and his passions and appetites, and put them into a cer-
tain context. When society relaxed its control over the individ-

240

ual, anomy rose, a state of the disintegration of society and the
individual. In that social state there was no firm moral control
of individual behaviour, and a kind of moral vacuum was creat-
ed in which the old standards and values no longer played their
role, and new ones had not yet been confirmed. This state op-
posed the moral order, regulation, and control that character-
ised the normal, ‘healthy’ state of society.

In The Division of Labor Durkheim considered anomy from
the aspect of social structure, explaining it by lack of co-ordina-
tion of social functions from the growth and development of
society. In Suicide he treated anomy as a moral crisis in which
the system of normative control of individual needs and pas-
sions was disrupted through social upheavals, which led to loss
of personal balance, and the feeling of belonging to a group, and
to loss of discipline and social solidarity. Deviant behaviour was
also a consequence of that.

Durkheim believed, in utopian fashion, that individual and
social needs could be consciously regulated, and kept within the
context of limitations dictated by the real social possibilities,
while preserving capitalist social relations. That would prevent
the rise of tension, spiritual crisis, feelings of disappointment
and distress, and consequently of deviant behaviour.

In developing the problem of the social essence of morality,
Durkheim expressed many true ideas. His recognition of social
conditions as decisive for the genesis of morality was positive;
so, too, was his analysis of the functional consequences of moral
tules for society, and his recognition of their socio-cultural in-
constancy on the one hand, and universality of the other.

The sociological interpretation of morality was very fruitful
in principle, but Durkheim’s conception was too abstract and
one-sided. His arguments for society as the sole worthy moral
goal were unsubstantiated and weak. One can hardly deny, for
example, the moral value of the personality and of its harmoni-
ous development. And although Durkheim recognised and ac-
tively defended the rights and dignity of the individual, his
theory did not allow him to examine the interaction of the in-
dividual and society dialectically in concrete historical condi-
tions. The principle of the unconditional superiority of society
over the individual was unsound. Abstract unhistorical collec-
tivism was just as unjustified as the abstract individualism that

241
16-1147

he constantly criticised. The relation of the individual and socie-
ty, considered from the moral aspect, cannot be reduced to a
relation of subordination. The relation between them is one of
dialectical interaction.

9. The Philosophical and Sociological Conception
of Religion

The conception of religion crowned the development of Durk-
heim’s idea of collective consciousness as ‘the highest form of
the psychic life’ or ‘the consciousness of the consciousnesses’.°?
The attitude to religion traditional for positivism, as the su-
preme social institution that ensured the integration of society,
acquired the form, with Durkheim, of quests for ways and
means of a sociological explanation of religion under the influ-
ence of English and American anthropologists, in particular Sir
James Frazer and Robertson Smith. Durkheim drew on anthro-
pological material since he considered, in the spirit of early evo-
lutionism, that ‘all the essential elements of religious thought
and life ought to be found, at least in germ, among the most
primitive religions’.°? He hoped, by studying totemism as the
most primitive form of religion, to understand the essence and
functions of religion in ‘complex’ societies which he considered
to be ‘only varieties of the same species’.°*

When approaching the matter of defining religion from study
of its primitive forms, Durkheim claimed that the idea of the
supernatural and the idea of God were not necessary attributes
of religion. He considered the division of all objects into two op-
posing classes, sanctified by religion (earthly—everyday, world-
ly, vulgar, and unclean; and sacred), an inherent feature of all
religious beliefs without exception.

The sacred (1) had a taboo character, a separateness from
earthly phenomena, and (2) was an object of aspiration, love,
and respect. The sacred was thus simultaneously a source of
constraint (taboo) and respect (authority). In Durkheim’s view,
that indicated the social nature of the sacred, since only society
had such qualities: it was at once a source of authority, love,
and adoration, and a source of constraint. The sacred embodied
the collective force, and inculcated the idea of the common in

242

individual consciousness, and connected it with something that
transcended it.

The earthly was linked with man’s everyday life, and his
everyday individual occupations, private interests, and egoistic
passions. The dichotomy of the sacred and earthly thus went
back, in Durkheim, to the dichotomy of the social and the
individual. He defined religion as follows:

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to
sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs
and practices which unite into one single moral community called
the Church, all those who adhere to them.° *

By ‘Church’ he meant an organisation that organised a group’s
religious life. Even among primitive peoples there were ‘churches’,
ie., people who looked after the timely and proper hold-
ing of religious rites and ceremonies. His main example of lay,
‘vulgar’ activity, was labour, the source of grief and sorrow; an
example of sacred activity was collective religious ceremonies
and rituals, the source of joy and a heightened state of the spir-
it. He repeatedly declared that his definition was far from ac-
ceptable to everyone. Its main sign was the performance of
rituals directed to sacred objects, from manipulation of which
the solidarity of the group gathered force, and the common, col-
lective consciousness was reinforced, which kept up the spirits
of the individuals and gave them the confidence necessary for
life.

As the theorist of ‘sociologism’ Durkheim considered that
neither physical nor biological causes could explain religion and
its origin and essence. He therefore rejected animism, which de-
duced religion from notions about an immortal soul (Edward
Taylor), and ‘naturism’, which deduced religion from involun-
tary adoration of physical natural forces (Max Miiller, and
others). These theories were based on an idea that ‘man has
superimposed on the reality available to observation an unreal
world built almost completely from the fanstastic images that
trouble his spirit in dreams’.°® The researcher’s task was to find
the objectively existing reality that was the cause, object, and
goal of religious beliefs and ceremonies. That reality was so-
ciety.

243
16+

In developing his sociological conception of religion, Durk-
heim expressed a number of ideas relative to the various types
of relations between the social reality and religion. He consid-
ered religion a social phenomenon in at least three senses: (1) as
a socially determined phenomenon; (2) as the embodiment of
notions of social reality in the collective consciousness (that
type of analysis was based on an identification of religious no-
tions with society, and an ontologisation of collective notions);
(3) as a phenomenon with functional social consequences
(which meant, in the context of Durkheim’s conception, analy-
sis of religion as a phenomenon meeting certain social needs).

When examining religion from the angle of its origin he saw
its source in the features of the social milieu. In The Division
of Labor, in which the causal explanation was still clearly differ-
entiated from other types of sociological analysis, he had ad-
vanced the thesis that religion could not be the basis of primi-
tive societies; although it permeated their core, it could not be
the cause of social structures, for ‘on the contrary it is the lat-
ter ... that explain the power and nature of the religious idea’.°”
Durkheim’s pointing out of the structure of primitive society
and its social organisation (a reflection and expression of which
was totemism as a religious system) was a concretisation of the
requirement to deduce the social from the social. The statement
that ‘religion is the product of social causes’,°* presupposed the
existence of a causal dependence between society and religion,
and recognition of the causal priority of society. In this case
Durkheim understood by social the morphological features of
the social facts: the structure of society and the intensity of its
members’ social intercourse. The true source of religiosity was
the coming together of the group.

Durkheim always regarded social intercourse as a positive
fact, as a good that brought people joy and inspiration. It could
only, in his view, be extra-economic intercourse, taking place
outside the labour process. So an idea of two qualitatively op-
posed worlds was created, viz., the everyday world and the sa-
cred, which evoked belief in the great transforming power of
collectivity.

Some researchers see a link between Durkheim’s theory of
collective inspiration and the crowd psychology developed at
that time (Le Bon and others).

244

Examination of religion as a special form of expression of the
social forces that subordinate individuals to themselves has a
notable place in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
The starting point was the idea of the identity of society and
collective notions, and the statement that society ‘is the con-
sciousness of the consciousnesses’.°? The thesis of society as
primary in relation to collective consciousness was replaced by
the idea that religious notions created society. By identifying
social consciousness with religious conscience Durkheim claimed
that the god of believers ‘is only a figurative expression of the
society’,’° while ‘the sacred principle is nothing more or less
than society transfigured and personified’.’’ Religion was thus
society itself, or rather the focus of all aspects of society that
shared the quality of sacredness, so that the influence of religion
on culture and the personality, and also on the principal pat-
terns of human thought was almost limitless. Society was the
author and object of the religious cult and dogmas; it created
religion and evoked religious worship; it was simultaneously god
and believer.

An important, and, moreover, very original element of Durk-
heim’s analysis of religion was his posing of it as a symbolic sys-
tem, a system of signs, in which sociological analysis would
come to see the reality that was the basis of religion, viz., so-
ciety.

In concluding that the main component of religion was not
its dogmatic part but the religious activity expressed in the col-
lective observance of rituals, Durkheim drew a conclusion about
the positive social function of religion. The cult, he thought,
was aimed at realising the dualism of the sacred and the profane
in people’s behaviour. All religious rites were accordingly divi-
sible into two kinds—negative and positive. The aim of the first
was to draw a sharp line between the sacred and the profane,
and to prevent desecration of the sacred by the profane, to
bring man closer to the sacred through self-renunciation, self-
abasement, or extreme asceticism. The task of a positive cult
was to acquaint believers with the sacred world. Durkheim dis-
tinguished the following main social functions in cult practice:
a disciplinary one, or function of coercion or control; a cement-
ing function, i.e., one of reinforcing and consolidating social
unity; a reproductive function by which the social heritage was

245

passed on to a new generation; and finally an euphoric function
consisting in the creation of joyful feelings of social well-being.
All these social functions of religious rites supported and
strengthened society’s social solidarity, and at the level of the
individual strengthened belief in his/her powers.

A by-product of Durkheim’s sociological analysis of religion
was an analysis of the content of human consciousness and of
the origin of the main logical capacities: the classification and
creation of general concepts. He explained both abilities as the
consequence of social, religious life, as ‘a product of religious
thought’, abounding in social content.’? Having rejected empir-
icism and apriorism, which could not explain the universal char-
acter of categories, Durkheim employed a structural approach
and asserted that the content of general concepts included
various aspects of social being. The idea of time, he claimed,
arose from the observation of regular sacred rites and cer-
emonies. Their repetition, together with the regularity of
the lunar and solar cycles, produced the concepts of periodicity,
duration, and temporality. In the same way the category of
space was said to have appeared from an identical evaluation
and differentiation of space by people of one and the same
civilisation. The objectivity of categories was due to their
collective character, general significance, and universal recogni-
tion and use.

When examining the relationship of religion and science,
Durkheim considered the latter a continuation and perfecting of
the former, on the grounds that religion expressed true, really
existing relations. His rejection of an epistemological analysis
of the forms of social consciousness led him to a misunder-
standing of their specific nature, and to asserting their kin-
ship and continuity. He declared religion to be eternal, since
there would always be a need to clothe the relations of man and
society in an ideological form. He ascribed the general features
of ideology, understood extremely broadly and formally, to
religion.

Having proclaimed a religion without a god by putting socie-
ty on a divine pedestal, Durkheim was seemingly aware that the
problem of the individual (which he always regarded as depend-
ing on the problem of society) remained theoretically resolved.
The conception of the individual could only be organically linked

246

with that of society by recognising the underlying role of
social-production activity, which linked man with his environ-
ment and social milieu, and made him the creator of history. In
rejecting the decisive role of the economy Durkheim approached
the problem from the other end. From the thesis that the
field of traditional religion was contracting more and more, he
came to claim that collective consciousness was acquiring a new
content and form in contemporaneous society that was embod-
ied in the ‘religion of humanity’, a rational expression of which
was the morality of individualism. As society developed, respect
for the individual became a kind of social dogma; the collective
social forces found expression in the cult of the individual. An
attitude to man as the individual embodiment of divinity could,
in Durkheim’s opinion, explain such an unexpected change in
the object of worship. But he did not manage to adduce con-
vincing theoretical arguments. He could not prove that the idea
of abstract bourgeois humanism in fact became the ideology of
all classes of capitalist society on the basis of which its ideolog-
ical unity was produced.

By depriving the concept of religion of its main component,
viz., belief in the supernatural, in God, and defending a broad
interpretation of religion as a system of beliefs and rituals
that concerned some sort of socially significant object, Durk-
heim in essence identified religion with an abstract ideology
of timeless, eternal character manifested identically in any
society.

The principle of evolutionism, that primitive social forms al-
ready contained all the features of the phenomenon of religion,
enabled Durkheim to draw a conclusion about its integrating
role in all human formations. Considering society the sole ob-
ject of religious worship (society as the embodiment of harmo-
nious accord), he did not bring out the true causes of this deifi-
cation, which was only possible under the antagonistic social
relations which functioned in a disguised, false form, alienated
from the individual. The objective reasons for this alienation of
society from the individual that made an irrational explanation
of the fact of religion possible, remained undisclosed in this
case. And I see in that the main fault of the sociological analy-
sis that ignores the existence of classes, and of class relations, as
the objective material basis of social life.

247

———LSS//_

10. Durkheim’s Place in the History of Sociology.
‘Sociologism’ and Marxism

Durkheim’s influence on capitalist sociology is now widely rec- |
ognised. He drew attention to many key, fundamental prob- |
lems of sociological science; and that, in particular, can explain
his popularity in France at the end of the nineteenth century
and in the first third of the twentieth, the spread of the in-
fluence of his ideas to other countries in Europe and America,
and the interest shown in them at the present time.” °
The nature of society, its integrative principle, its healthy

and pathological states, the essence and functions of social con-
sciousness, the methods of sociological investigation, and the
status of sociology as a science, which were all problems that
Durkheim tackled from positions of a quite integral philosophi-

cal and sociological conception, were undoubtedly among the
most important matters of theoretical sociology. The increas-
ing influence of the Marxian methodology on bourgeois social
thought in our day is encouraging a new interpretation of them

in many ways. The theories of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and
Pareto are more and more being juxtaposed in present quests for

an answer to the problems of the development of the modern
world.”4

The general theoretical theses of ‘sociologism’ underlie the

principles of the structural functionalism school. It was not
without reason that the Jnternational Encyclopedia of the So-
cial Sciences, when defining Durkheim’s place and significance

in the history of sociology, called him ‘one of the two princi-

pal founders of the modern phase of sociological theory’.
Structural functionalism based its theoretical, methodological
conception on the theses, developed by Durkheim, of society as
a self-regulating system with qualities not reducible to those of
the separate elements, of public order as the normal state of
society, and of the significance of the institutions of education
and control, and of the principles of the functional approach to
analysis of social phenomena from the standpoint of the role
they perform in the system. It would not be an exaggeration to
say that the directions of the analysis of society pointed out by
Durkheim, taken as a whole, are the basic theoretical equip-
ment of present-day structural functionalism.

248

Durkheim’s interest in manifestations of social crisis, and his
stressing of attention to their social conditioning, made it pos-
sible for his opponents and critics among Western economists
and sociologists to compare ‘sociologism’ with certain proposi-
tions of the theory of Marxism. He began to be reproached with
collectivism and materialism already after publication of his first
works. Paul Barth, for instance, put ‘sociologism’ and Marxism
in one and the same group of social doctrines, which he called
‘the economic conception of history’ in his The Philosophy of
History as Sociology. In today’s Western literature attempts to
compare him and Marx are often met, parallels between them
drawn, and features of similarity brought out that allegedly oc-
curred in their answers to certain fundamental matters of socio-
logical theory.

Durkheim was quite familiar with certain of Marx’s main
works, had read Capital, recognised its significance, and expressed
his attitude to some of the main theoretical theses of Marx-
ism. When criticising Marxism, he identified it with vulgar eco-
nomic determinism, assertions of a linear causal dependence of
social phenomena on economic factors, and non-recognition of
a feedback of ideas on economic affairs. He himself thus defined
the point at which his sociological conception was close to
Marxism, namely, in the ‘idea that social life should be explained
not by the conception that those involved in it hold, but by
deep causes that escape consciousness’.’ °

While recognising the scientific value of the idea of the ob-
jectivity of social life, Durkheim, however, did not understand
the same thing by objectivity as Marx. In his interpretation it
was the independence of social phenomena from individual con-
sciousness and the individual’s ideas, and the objective existence
of collective consciousness in relation to that of the individual.
In Marx’s understanding of it, the objectivity of socio-historical
reality was the natural-history character of the development of
society, following laws that did not depend, in the last analysis,
on any consciousness, either individual or collective.

While insisting on the primacy of the social, Durkheim under-
stood by it primarily the ideological, or rather the moral. He
identified the social and the moral milieus. Marx, however, did
not reduce social relations exclusively to economic ones, and rec-
ognised the existence of social ties (family, national, class,

249

group), considering material relations of production the basic
ones on which other relations were built up and through which
they acquired a concrete historical content.

Durkheim’s attitude to the economy was typical of him.
While treating it in a simplified way, as a state of industrial tech-
nology, he considered that economic ties did not form firm so-
cial contacts. In his opinion, economic activity was asocial. His
‘social types’, by which he had in mind the societies of different
historical periods, signified a single complex of ecological, de-
mographic, and ideological factors. The last, he considered, were
determinant. His ‘social types’ had nothing in common with the
Marxian concept of a socio-economic formation, for which rec-
ognition of the decisive role of the relations of production in
it, the division of society into classes, and explanation of the
ideological and other spiritual spheres as reflections of class
positions and interests were characteristic.

Durkheim and his followers began their explanation of the
patterns of social life from what he called collective conscience.
The origin and essence of that, in his opinion, thus depended
directly on the intercourse between individuals considered out-
side any concrete historical conditions, and outside people’s
concrete, historical activity. He regarded the complex business
of intercourse and communion solely as the psychological inter-
action of individuals during collective gatherings, ceremonies,
religious festivals and rituals.

Durkheim idealised social relations and treated them as rela-
tions of concord, solidarity, harmony, and co-operation. He
treated social conflicts and contradictions that went beyond the
limits of ‘normal’, natural social order and as a sickness that
could be eliminated without altering the main social founda-
tions. The basic inspiration of ‘sociologism’ was concentrated in
that conservative orientation, deeply hostile to the revolu-
tionary spirit of Marxism, and the essence of its theory, and in
any case to the explanation of development asa struggle of op-
posing social forces.

The global treatment of social consciousness as an aggregate
of collective notions, without distinguishing the essential specif-
ic nature of its separate norms, replacement of the question of
the essence of the various forms of social consciousness by that
of their functions, a hyperbolisation of certain functions, and

250

the replacement of all of them in essence, by one, the integra-
tional—such were the epistemological roots of Durkheim’s ‘so-
ciologism’.

The contradictions of this conception were based on the con-
tradiction between his naturalistic objective methodology and
the spiritualist theory of collective consciousness, identified
with society.

Profoundly and acutely sensing the social crisis, Durkheim
suggested that it could lead to fatal results if not ended. All
his efforts were therefore directed to maintaining the founda-
tions of the existing social organisation, and to reforming and
improving it. ‘Sociologism’ served, as a conception, to justify
this aim.

It is significant that the efforts of Western sociologists in our
day to justify the existence of capitalism theoretically and to
find a way out of the crisis, are based on the ideas and concep-
tions of Durkheim, who made the problem of the crisis of the
capitalist world the keystone of sociology. In that respect the
conceptions of the ‘neoconservatives’ (Daniel Bell, Robert Nis-
beth, Seymour Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Samuel Huntington,
Daniel Moynihan, and others) are characteristic; in their pub-
lications they reproduce and rework Durkheim’s conceptions
about social order and anomy, and about the meritocracy (just
remuneration for services in accordance with work and talents),
social egoism, which allegedly leads to ever increasing claims by
the broad masses, and expounding pessimistic views of human
nature, and of the need, in that connection, to strengthen social
control and the ‘social authority’ of leaders.

The French Marxist Michel Dion has justly said in his Socio-
logie et idéologie, that sociology is involved in the ‘great battles’
of our epoch, that it ‘either favours maintenance of the old cap-
italist society’ or, on the contrary, ‘works to replace it by a
socialist society’.’” While defending Durkheim against leftists’
accusations of ‘reactionary diversion’, Dion said that the ambi-
guity of sociologism was due to Durkheim’s belonging ‘to a
class, the bourgeois class, that still believes, or wants to believe,
that its social system and values are eternal’.”* It is in that that
one must seek the sources of the contradictoriness of Durk-
heim’s conception, which differs favourably from non-scientific
theological and subjective-idealist conceptions. His critique of

251

biological and psychological reductionism in sociology, his
pointing out of the need to unite sociology and philosophy, and
his critique of abstract speculations, and of juggling empirical
facts not directed by theory, have not lost their topicality to
this day.

But, in comparison with scientific Marxist-Leninist sociology,
‘sociologism’ was unsound as regards both methodology and
theory.

Notes

‘ In what follows I shall refer to these works by the abbreviated titles
Division of Labor and The Rules.

2 In the pamphlets L’Allemagne au dessus de tout (1915) and Qui a
voulu la guerre (Germany Above All, and Who Wanted the War?) Durk-
heim charged Germany with guilt for the war disasters.

3 Emile Durkheim. Socialism and Saint-Simon. Translated by Charlot-
te Sattler (The Antioch Press, Yellow Springs, 1958) p. 5.

* Ibid., p 7.

5 Ibid., pp. 25-26.

6 Emile Durkheim. Les régles de la méthode sociologique (Felix Al-
can, Paris, 1895), p 19.

7 Georges Davy. Emile Durkheim. Revue frangaise de sociologie, 1960,
1, 1: 3-24.

* Emile Durkheim. Sociology and Its Scientific Field. In: Kurt
H. Wolff (Ed.). Emile Durkheim, 1858-1917. A Collection of Essays
(Ohio State U.P., Columbus, Ohio, 1960), pp. 354-375.

° The idea of ‘sociologism’ is encountered in the works of many of
Durkheim’s contemporaries (Alfred Espinas, Jean Izoulet, Eugéne de Ro-
berty).

10 Emile Durkheim. The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by
G. Simpson (The Free Press, New York, 1956).

+1 Emile Durkheim. Les régles, p 128.

‘2 Harry Alpert. Emile Durkheim and His Sociology (Columbia U.P.,
New York, 1939); Anthony Giddens. Capitalism and Modern Social
Theory. An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber
(Cambridge U.P., London, 1971); Steven Lukes. Emile Durkheim. His
Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study (Allen Lane, London,
1973); Hans-Peter Miiller. Wertkrise und Gesellschaftsreform: Emile
Durkheims Schriften zur Politik (Enke, Stuttgart, 1983).

252

}3 Emile Durkheim. Le suicide, p. 362.

14 Thid., pp 14-15.

15 Emile Durkheim. Sociologie et philosophie (Presses Universitaires
de France, Paris, 1967), p 67.

16 See Célestin Bouglé’s preface to Durkheim’s Sociologie et philoso-
phie, Op. cit., p IX.

17 [bid.

18 Emile Durkheim. Les régles, p 20.

19 Ibid.

2° Ibid., p 54.

21 Tbid., p 23.

22 Emile Durkheim. The Division of Labor in Society, p 49.

23 See Les régles, pp. 78-80.

24 Ibid., p 80.

25 Durkheim occasionally came close to another, more scientific
understanding of the norm as the optimum variant of the functioning of
society, and sometimes identified the norm with the ideal.

26 The Division of Labor in Society, p 173.

27 Ibid., p 45.

28 The typologies of Comte, Spencer, Tonnies, and others are such.

29 The Division of Labor, p. 169.

3° Thid.

31 Ibid., p 401.

3? Ibid., p 111.

33 Ibid., p 364.

3* Ibid., p 172.

35 Ibid.

26 Thid., p 368.

37 Tbid., p 370.

38 Tbid.

9° Ibid., p 375.

4° Tbid., p 384.

*) Ibid., p 371.

“? Ibid., p 372.

42 Dbid., p 375.

** Ibid., p 381.

“5 Thid., p 389.

*6 Tbid., p 464.

*7 Emile Durkheim. Le suicide, p VII.

48 Ibid.

253

49 Ibid., p 148.

5° Thid., p 223.

5! Thid., p 141.

52 Thid., p 229.

53 Dbid., p 311.

54 Tbid., p 277.

55 Hans-Peter Miller. Op. cit.

56 Whitney Pope. Durkheim’s ‘Suicide’. A Classic Analyzed (Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976).

57 Emile Durkheim. Sociologie et philosophie, p 134.

58 Ihid., p 135.

5% Tbid., p 101.

5° Thid., p74.

®! Ibid., p 51.

62 Emile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
Translated by J. W. Swain (Allen & Unwin, London, 1915; reprinted by
The Free Press, New York, 1965), p 492.

®3 Ibid., p 354.

64 Ibid., p 114.

6S Thid., p 62.

66 Ibid., p 322.

67 Emile Durkheim. The Division of Labor, p 179.

*® Emile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,
p. 472.

6° Tbid., p 492.

70 Thid., p 258.

™! Ibid., p 347.

12 Ibid., p 22.

73 See Robert Reiner, Steve Fenton, and Jan Hummett. Durkheim
and Modern Sociology (CUP, Cambridge, 1984).

74 See Anthony Giddens. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory.

78 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 4 (The
Macmillan Co. and The Free Press, New York, 1968), p 311.

76 Emile Durkheim. Antonio Labriola. Essais sur la conception ma-
terialiste de l'histoire (Paris, Giard et Briere). In: Revue philosophique de
la France et de l'étranger, 1897, 44, July to December: 648.

77 Michel Dion. Sociologie et idéologie (Editions sociales, Paris,
1973), p 60.

78 Tbid., pp 68-69.

11
THE SOCIOLOGY OF MAX WEBER

Piama Haidenko

1. Max Weber and His Times

The moulding of Max Weber’s socio-political views and theoret-
ical position was largely detemined by the social and political
situation in Germany in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, and by the state of science at that time, above all the
state of political economy, history, and social philosophy.

A struggle of two social forces was characteristic of the
situation in Germany then: viz., the Junkers, associated with
large-scale landowning, who were departing from the historical
scene, and the consolidating capitalist class, striving for polit-
ical independence. A specific feature of the development of
capitalism in Germany was that it could never free itself from
the shackles of the feudal-bureaucratic system; that put its
stamp both on the political life of Germany and on the charac-
ter of scientific thinking, above all, of course, in the field of
the social sciences.

The self-awareness of the German capitalist class was moulded
at a time when a new class, the proletariat, had appeared in
the historical arena. The German bourgeoisie had been forced
to fight on two fronts: against the conservative, defensive ten-
dencies of big landowners, on the one hand, and against Social
Democracy, on the other. That determined its dual character,
its political indecisiveness, and the contradictory nature of the
position of its theorists.

255

Max Weber (1864-1920) was one of the latter. He grew up
in a well-to-do bourgeois family, and acquired a taste for politics
in his early youth. In his political orientation he was a liberal
whose views had the nationalist hue caused by the peculiarities
of Germany’s historical development in the nineteenth century.

Weber studied jurisprudence in Heidelberg University, but
his interests were not limited to that one field; in his student
years he was also occupied with political economy and econom-
ic history; and his studies in jurisprudence were also of a his-
torical character. That was due to the influence of the so-called
historical school which predominated in German political econ-
omy in the last quarter of the century (Wilhelm Roscher, Kurt
Knies, Gustav Schmoller). The members of this school, who
were sceptical toward classical English political economy, were
oriented not so much on the construction of a single theory as
on bringing out the inner links between economic development
and the legal, ethnographic, psychological, and moral and reli-
gious aspects of society’s life. They tried to establish this link
by historical analysis. That posing of the matter was largely dic-
tated by the specific conditions of Germany’s development.
As a bureaucratic state with remnants of the feudal system,
Germany was unlike England; Germans therefore never fully
shared the principles of individualism and utilitarianism that
underlay the classical political economy of Adam Smith and
Ricardo.

Weber’s first works—Zur Geschichte der Handelgesellschaften
in Mittelalter (On the History of Merchant Guilds in the Middle
Ages) (1889), Die rémische Agrargeschichte in threr Bedeutung
fur das Staats- und Privaterecht (Roman Agrarian History and
Its Significance for Public and Private Law) (1891), which
immediately set him among the major German scholars—are
evidence that he had mastered the requirements of the histori-
cal school, and knew how to employ historical analysis to bring
out the link of economic relations with public law formations.
In Roman Agrarian History he had already plotted the outlines
of his ‘empirical sociology’ (as he called it), which was closely
linked with history. He treated the evolution of landowning
in antiquity in connection with social and political evolution,
turning as well to analysis of the forms of family organisation,
daily life, morals, religious cults, etc.

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256

His interest in the agrarian question had a quite real under-
lying political motive; in the 1890s he published a number of
papers and reports on the agrarian question in Germany, in
which he criticised the position of the conservative Junkers
and defended Germany’s industrial road of development.

At the same time he tried to develop a new political plat-
form for bourgeois liberalism in the conditions of the transition
to state-monopoly capitalism that was already making itself felt
in Germany.

Weber was a professor of Freiburg University from 1894,
and from 1896 in Heidelberg. In 1904 he was invited to St.
Louis, in the USA, to read a course of lectures. He brought back
many impressions from his journey, and his reflections on the
socio-political system of America strongly influenced his devel-
opment as a sociologist.

Labor, immigration, the Negro problem, politicians—those were the
things that caught his interest. When he returned to Germany, he
did so with the conviction that professional machine politics were
essential for modern mass democracy if a countervailing power to
a bureaucratic mandarin class of civil servants are to be created.’

In 1904 he became the editor (along with Werner Sombart)
of the sociological journal Archiv fiir Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik, in which the most important of his works appeared,
including (in 1905) the world-famous study translated as
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This study
was the beginning of a series of publications on the sociology
of religion on which he was engaged right up to his death. He
regarded his works on sociology as a polemic against Marxism;
it was not by chance that he called the lectures on the sociology
of religion that he read in Vienna University in 1918 ‘a positive
critique of the materialist conception of history’. But he inter-
preted the materialist understanding of history in too vulgar and
simplified a way, identifying it with economic materialism. At
the same time he reflected on problems of logic and the method-
ology of the social sciences; a series of papers appeared on
these problems between 1903 and 1905S.

The range of Weber’s interest in that period was unusually
broad: he occupied himself with the ancient, mediaeval, and

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17-1147

modern history of the economy, law, religion, and even art;
reflected on the nature, history, and future fate of modern capi-
talism; studied the problem of capitalist urbanisation, and in
that connection the history of the ancient and mediaeval town;
he investigated the specific nature of contemporaneous science
in its differences from other historical forms of knowledge;
and he took a lively interest in the political situation not only in
Germany but also outside it, including America and Russia.

Weber worked from 1919 in the University of Munich. Be-
tween 1916 and 1919 he published one of his main works (The
Economic Ethics of World Religions), a study on which he was
working to the end of his life. Among his other important works
were Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation) (1919) and
Wissenschaft als Beruf (Science as a Vocation) (1920). They
reflected his mental mood after World War I, his discontent with
Germany’s policy in the Weimar period, and his very gloomy
view of the future of capitalist industrial civilisation.

Weber died in 1920 without having accomplished all his
intentions. His fundamental work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
(1921) (translated as The Theory of Social and Economic Organ-
ization), in which he summed up his sociological studies, and
collections of articles on the methodology and logic of cultural-
historical and sociological studies, on the sociology of religion,
politics, and the sociology of music,were published posthumously.

2. Methodological Problems of the Sciences of Culture

The methodological principles of Weber’s sociology were closely
linked with the theoretical situation of non-Marxian social sci-
ence at the end of the nineteenth century. It is especially impor-
tant to understand his attitude to the ideas of Dilthey and the
neo-Kantians properly.

The problem of the general significance of the sciences of
culture was central to Weber’s work. On one point he was agreed
with Dilthey: he shared the Jatter’s antinaturalism and was
convinced that it was impossible, when studying human activity,
to start from the same tnethodological principles that the astron-
omer used when studying the motion of celestial bodies. Like
Dilthey, he considered that neither the historian, nor the sociol-

258

ogist, nor the economist could ignore the fact that man is a
conscious being. But Weber resolutely rejected being guided, in
the study of social life, by the method of direct experience and
intuition, since the result of such a mode of study lacked gener-
al significance.

According to him, the main mistake of Dilthey and his fol-
lowers was psychologism. Instead of studying the psychological
process of the origin of certain ideas in the historian from the
angle that these ideas appeared somehow in his mind, and how
he subjectively arrived at an understanding of the link between
them, in other words, instead of investigating the world of the
historian’s experiences, Weber proposed studying the logic of
the formation of the concepts the historian relied on, because
only expression in the form of generally significant concepts
of what ‘was obtained intuitively’ converted the subjective
world of the historian’s notions into the objective world of his-
torical science.

In his methodological studies, Weber essentially adhered to
the neo-Kantian variant of the antinaturalist substantiation of
history.

Following in the footsteps of Heinrich Rickert, Weber dis-
tinguished two acts—value orientation and evaluation; while the
first converted our individual impression into an objective, gen-
erally significant judgment, the second did not go beyond sub-
jectivity. The science of culture, society, and history, he de-
clared, should be just as free of value judgments as the natural
sciences.

That requirement did not mean that the scholar should in
general reject his own evaluations and tastes; they should simply
not invade the limits of his scientific judgments. Beyond those
limits he had the right to express them as was convenient, but
always as a private person, and not as a scientist.

Weber substantially amended Rickert’s premisses, however.
Unlike the latter, who treated values and their hierarchy as
something suprahistorical, Weber inclined to treat value as an
orientation of some historical period, as the direction of inter-
est inherent in the given age. Values were thus transferred from
the realm of the suprahistorical to history, and the neo-Kantian
doctrine of values was brought close to positivism. The expres-
sion ‘value orientation’ meant only a philosophical interpreta-

259

tion of the specifically scientific ‘interests’ that guided the choice
and working up of the object of empirical investigation.”

The interest of the age was something more stable and objec-
tive than simply the researcher’s private interest, but at the same
time it was something much more subjective than the supra-
historical interest that neo-Kantians called ‘values’. For Rickert
values were rooted in a suprahistorical reality, the transcenden-
tal subject.

By converting them into the ‘interest of the age’, i.e., into
something relative, Weber thereby gave new meaning to
Rickert’s doctrine.

Since values, according to Weber, were only an expression
of the general set-up of their time, every age had its own ‘abso-
lutes’. The absolute thus proved to be historical, and so relative.

3. The Ideal Type as a Logical Construct

Weber was one of the greatest historians and sociologists who
tried consciously to apply the neo-Kantian instrumental con-
cepts in the practice of empirical research.

Rickert’s doctrine of concepts as means of overcoming the
intensive and extensive diversity of empirical reality was refract-
ed in an original way with Weber into the category of the
‘ideal type’. Speaking generally, the ideal type was the ‘interest
of the age’ expressed in the form of a theoretical construct.
The ideal type was thus not derived from empirical reality, but
was constructed as a theoretical scheme. In that sense Weber
called it a ‘utopia’.

The more sharply and precisely the ideal type has been constructed,
thus the more abstract and unrealistic (weltfremder) in this sense it
is, the better it is able to perform its methodological functions in
formulating the classification of terminology, and in the formula-
tion of classifications, and of hypotheses.?

Weber’s ideal type is thus close to the ideal model employed
in natural science. Weber himself well understood that. The
mental constructs called ideal types, he said, could be encoun-
tered just as little in reality as physical reactions that are calcula-

260

ted only by assuming an absolutely empty space.* He called the
ideal type a product of our fantasy, a purely mental formation
created by ourselves, thereby stressing its extra-empirical origin.
Just as an ideal model was constructed by the natural scientist
as an instrument and means for knowing nature, so the ideal
type was created as a tool for comprehending historical reality.
He considered that the formation of abstract ideal types should
be treated not as a goal but as a means.* It was because of its
separation from empirical reality, and difference from it, that
the ideal type could serve as a sort of scale for comparing reality
with it.

Such concepts as ‘economic exchange’, ‘Homo oeKonomicus’,
‘craft’, ‘capitalism’, ‘Church’ ‘sect’, ‘Christianity’, ‘mediaeval
urban economy’, were (according to Weber) typical-ideal
constructs employed as a means to describe individual historical
formations. He considered the ‘realistic’ interpretation (in the
mediaeval meaning of the word) of ideal types to be one of the
commonest errors, i.e., the identifying of these mental con-
structs with historical, cultural reality itself and their ‘sub-
stantialising’.

But difficulties arose for him here connected with the ques-
tion of how an ideal type was constructed. As regards their
content these constructions had a utopian character arising from
the mental accentuation of certain elements of reality in it.° We
easily discover contradictions here in the treatment of the ideal
type. On the one hand, Weber, in fact, stressed that ideal types
were a ‘utopia’, a ‘fantasy’. On the other hand, it turned out that
they were drawn from reality itself, albeit in a way that ‘de-
formed’ them, i.e., by accentuating, singling out, and sharpen-
ing elements that seemed typical to the investigator.

So, what was the ideal type: an apriori construct or an empir-
ical generalisation? The singling out of certain elements of reali-
ty so as to form a concept, for example, like ‘urban craft guild
economy’, seemingly presupposed singling out something from
individual phenomena which, if not common to them all, was at
least typical of many. That procedure was directly counterposed
to the formation of individualised historical concepts as Rickert
imagined them; it rather resembled the formation of generalising
concepts.

In order to resolve the contradiction Weber drew a line be-

261

tween historical and sociological ideal types.

Rickert had already noted that sociology as a science, in
contrast to history, had to be classed among the nomothetic
sciences that employed a generalising method. General concepts
functioned in them as an end of knowledge, not as the means;
the mode of forming sociological concepts, according to him,
did not differ logically from the way concepts of the natural
sciences were formed. The peculiarity of Weber’s conception of
the ideal type, and of the whole series of difficulties associated
with it, was due to its being for him a methodological principle
of both sociological and historical knowledge. As A. Walter
noted in his article Max Weber als Soziologe, the individualising
and generalising tendencies in Weber were always interwoven,
since history and sociology were often inseparable for him.”

When Weber first introduced the concept of the ideal type
in his methodological works of 1904, he regarded it mainly as
a means of historical knowledge, as a historical ideal type. That
was why he stressed that it was only a means of knowledge,
and not an end.

Weber differed from Rickert in his very understanding of the
job of history; he did not limit himself to reconstructing ‘what
in fact had been’, as Rickert recommended, oriented on Leopold
Ranke’s historical school, but was rather inclined to subject
the historically individual to causal analysis. He was thereby
already introducing an element of generalisation into historical
research, with the result that the difference between history and
sociology was considerably reduced. Weber wrote, when defin-
ing the role of the ideal type in history and sociology, that
sociology (it had often been suggested as going without saying)
created concepts of types and looked for general rules of events
in contrast to history, which aspired to causal analysis of indi-
vidual, culturally important actions, formations, and personalities.

The task of history, according to Weber, was thus to estab-
lish causal connections between individual historical formations.
The ideal type served a means for that of disclosing the genetic
connection of historical phenomena; he therefore called it the
genetic ideal type.®

What was the sociological ideal type? If, according to Weber,
history should strive after a causal analysis of individual phe-
nomena, i.e., phenomena localised in time and space, the job of

262

sociology was to establish the general rules of events irrespective
of their space-time determination. In that sense ideal types, as
instruments of sociological research, should obviously be more
general, and could be called ‘pure ideal types’ in contrast to
genetic ideal ones. The sociologist thus constructed pure ideal
models of dominance (charismatic, rational, and patriarchal)
that were encountered in all historical epochs at any point of
the globe. ‘Pure types’ were more suitable in research the ‘purer’
they were, ie., the further away from real, empirically existing
phenomena.

Weber compared the ‘pure types’ of sociology with the ideal-
typical constructions of political economy in the sense that (1)
in both cases there was the organisation of a human action as if
it had taken place in ideal conditions, and (2) both disciplines
treated this ideal form of the course of the action independently
of the local conditions of place and time. It was assumed that if
the ideal conditions were met, then the action would be per-
formed in precisely the same way in any epoch and any country.
The difference of conditions and their effect on the course of
events were established, according the Weber, by their deviation
from the ideal type, which was always encountered, but only an
ideal-type construction made it possible to note and express this
deviation in general concepts.

As one of Weber’s students has noted, genetic ideal types
differed from pure ones only in degree of commonality. The
genetic type was employed locally in time and space, but
the application of the pure type was not localised; the genet-
ic type was a means of bringing out a connection that only oc-
curred once, while the pure type was a means of bringing out
a connection that had always existed; Rickert’s qualitative dif-
ference between history and sociology was changed into a quan-
titative one in Weber.

As for the formation of historical concepts, Weber departed
from Rickert in accentuating the generalisation aspect. In sociol-
ogy, on the contrary, Weber softened Rickert’s nomothetic
principle by introducing an element of ‘individualisation’. The
latter was expressed in Weber’s refusing to establish laws of
social life, and his limiting himself to the more modest task of
establishing rules of the passage of social events.

To sum up, we can now thus say that the contradictions that

263

arose in connection with Weber’s forming of ideal-type concepts
were largely connected with the different functions and differ-
ent origin of ideal types in history and sociology. While it could
be said in reference to the historical ideal type that it was a
means of knowledge, but not its end, that was not always so
with regard to the sociological ideal type. Furthermore, whereas
the ideal type introduced an element of the general in history,
in sociology it performed the function rather of replacing law-
governed connections by typical ones. Thus, by means of the
ideal type, Weber considerably reduced the gap between history
and sociology that divided them in the theory of the Baden
school. In that respect the German sociologist Hans Freyer was
right when he remarked that the concept of the ideal type made
the opposition of the individualising and the generalising modes
of thought less pronounced since, on the one hand, it brought
out what was characteristic in the individual and, on the other
hand, came only to the typical through generalisation, and not
to a general validity of laws.®

4. The Problem of Understanding and the
Category of ‘Social Action’

In order to show how Weber’s concept of the ideal type was
applied, we must analyse it from the angle of its content, and
for that it is necessary to introduce another category of his
sociology, namely that of understanding (Verstehen). However
paradoxical it may seem, Weber was compelled to employ a
category in his researches that he had objected to in Dilthey,
Croce, and other spokesmen of intuitivism, though ‘understand-
ing’ had a different meaning for him than in intuitivism.

A need to understand the subject-matter of its study distin-
guished sociology from the natural sciences, according to Weber.
Human behaviour, like all events, he said, displayed both
connections and regularities in its course. But what distinguished
human behaviour alone was connections and patterns whose
course was understandably (verstdndlich) explicable.'° The
fact that human behaviour was subject to intelligent inter-
pretation presupposed a specific difference between the science
of behaviour (sociology) and the natural sciences. It was in that

264

point that Dilthey had seen the difference between the sciences
of the mind and the sciences of nature.

Weber, however, immediately rushed to distance himself from
Dilthey; he did not counterpose ‘understanding’ to causal ‘ex-
planation’ but, on the contrary, linked them closely together.

Sociology (in the sense in which this highly ambiguous word is used
here) [he wrote} is a science which attempts the interpretive under-
standing (deutend verstehen) of social action in order thereby
to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects [italics
addedJ.??

The difference between his category of understanding and
Dilthey’s corresponding one was not only that Weber’s under-
standing preceded explanation, while Dilthey counterposed
them, but that understanding, according to Weber, was not a
psychological category as Dilthey supposed, and interpretive
sociology, accordingly, was not a part of psychology.!?

Let us examine Weber’s reasoning. Sociology, according to
him, should, like history, take the behaviour of the individual
or of a group of individuals as its starting point. The separate
individual and his behaviour were the ‘cell’ of sociology and his-
tory, their ‘atom’, the ‘simplest (unterste) unit’, which was
itself no longer further divisible or decomposable.'* Psycholo-
gy, however, also studied the individual’s behaviour. What then
was the difference between the psychological and the sociolog-
ical approaches?

Sociology, Weber said, examined the behaviour of the indi-
vidual only in so far as the latter invested his actions with a
definite sense. Only such behaviour could interest the sociolo-
gist; as for the psychologist, this element was not determinant
for him. Weber introduced the sociological concept of action
(Handeln) through the concept of sense or meaning. “In ‘action’
[he wrote] is included all human behaviour when and in so far
as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it.”!*

It is important to note that he had in mind the sense that
the individual invested his behaviour with; he repeatedly stressed
that it was not a matter of a ‘metaphysical’ sense regarded as
some ‘higher’, ‘truer’ meaning (sociology, according to him, did
not deal with metaphysical realities and was not a normative

265

science) nor of an ‘objective’ sense that the individual’s actions
could ultimately acquire independently of his intentions. By
that Weber did not, of course, deny either the possibility of
there being normative disciplines or the possibility of a ‘diver-
gence’ between the subjectively implied sense of an individual
action and its certain objective sense. In the latter case, how-
ever, he preferred not to use ‘sense’, since it presupposed a sub-
ject for which it existed. He only claimed that the object of
sociological research was an action associated with a subjectively
implied meaning. Sociology, according to him, should be ‘under-
standing’ or ‘interpretive’ in so far as the individual’s action was
intelligent. But this understanding was not psychological since
the sense did not belong to the sphere of psychology and was
not the subject-matter of psychology.

One of the central methodological categories of Weber’s
sociology—that of social action—was linked with the principle
of ‘understanding’. How important this category was for him
can be judged from his defining sociology as the science that
studied social action.

How did Weber himself define social action?

In ‘action’ is included all human behaviour when and in so far as
the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it. Action in
this sense may be either overt or purely inward and subjective;
... Action is social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meaning
attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes
account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its
course. *

A social action thus presupposed two aspects, according
to Weber; the subjective motivation of the individual or group,
without which one could not in general speak of action, and an
orientation on another person or persons, which Weber called
‘expectation’ and without which the action could not be regard-
ed as social.

Let us dwell, to begin with. on the first aspect. Weber insist-
ed that sociology could not establish the causal connections
that ultimately made it possible to draw an objective picture of
the social process, without allowing for the motives of the actor.
It is interesting to compare Parsons’s similar argument.! ©

266

The category of social action, which requires an understand-
ing of the motives of the individual, is the decisive point on
which Weber’s sociological approach differs from Durkheim’s
sociology. By introducing the concept of social action Weber in
essence gave an interpretation of social fact directed polemi-
cally against what Durkheim proposed. In opposition to Durk-
heim he considered that neither society as a whole nor any
forms of collectivity should be treated (if one were to approach
the matter really scientifically) as subjects of action; the latter
could only be separate individuals.

For still other cognitive purposes as, for instance, juristic, or for
practical ends, it may on the other hand be convenient or even indis-
pensable to treat social collectivities, such as states, associations,
business corporations, foundations, as if they were individual per-
sons. Thus they may be treated as the subjects of rights and duties
or as the performers of legally significant actions. But for the sub-
jective interpretation of action in sociological work these collectivi-
ties must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organiza-
tion of particular sets of individual persons, since these alone can be
treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable ac-
tion.’?

According to Weber, sociology could treat collectives as result-
ants of the individuals composing them; they were not independ-
ent realities, as with Durkheim, but rather modes of the organ-
isation of the actions of separate individuals.

Weber did not rule out the possibility of employing such
concepts in sociology as family, nation, state, and army, which
the sociologist could not in fact get along without. But he de-
manded that one should not forget that these forms of collec-
tivity were not really subjects of social action, and that one
could not, therefore, ascribe will and thought to them, and
could not have recourse to the concepts of collective will or
collective thought except in a metaphorical sense.'® It was dif-
ficult for Weber, one must note, to be consistent in his ‘method-
ological individualism’; a number of complications arose for
him when he tried to apply the category of social action, espe-
cially when analysing traditional society.

Understanding of the motivation, of ‘the subjectively implied

267

sense’, was thus a necessary element of sociological research.
What, however, was ‘understanding’ when Weber did not identi-
fy it with its interpretation by psychology?

According to him the psychological understanding of other
people’s mental states was only a subsidiary means, and not the
main one for a historian or a sociologist. They could only resort
to it when the sense of the action being explained could not be
understood.

In explaining the irrationalities of action sociologically, that form
of psychology which employs the method of subjective under-
standing (verstehende Psychologie) undoubtedly can make decisive-
ly important contributions. But this does not alter the fundamental

methodological situation. !?

What were these methodological principles? Action oriented
subjectively quite rationally in accordance with means consid-
ered (subjectively) to be unambiguously adequate to achieve
(subjectively) unambiguous and clearly realisable ends, he said,
was directly most understandable in its sense structure.” °

Let us analyse this definition. Sociology should thus be
oriented on the action of an individual or group of individuals.
An intelligible action was the most ‘understandable’ for that,
ie., one (1) directed to attaining goals clearly realisable by
the actor himself, and (2) which employed means to attain
those ends recognised as adequate by the actor himself. His
awareness was thus necessary for the action studied to figure as
social reality. Weber called this type of action purposeful or
goal-oriented rational (zweckrational). There was no need
(according to him) to resort to psychology in order to under-
stand it. The more behaviour was oriented in accordance with
legitimately oriented rationality (Richtigkeitsrationalitat)*},
he said, the less necessary it was to explain its course by psycho-
logical considerations of some sort.??

Intelligent goal-oriented rational action was not the subject-
matter of psychology precisely because the goal the individual
set himself could not be understood simply by starting from an
analysis of his mental life. Examination of this goal took us
beyond the limits of psychologism. The link between the goal
and the means chosen by the individual to realise it were medi-

268

ated, of course, by the individual’s psychology, but (according
to Weber) the more nearly the action was goal-oriented the
lower was the coefficient of psychological refraction, and the
‘purer’ and more rational the link was between goal and means.

That did not mean, of course, that he regarded a goal-ori-
ented rational action as some kind of universal type of action;
on the contrary, he not only did not consider it universal but
did not even consider it predominant in empirical reality. It
was an ideal type, not an empirically general, let alone univer-
sal one. It was seldom met in pure forms in reality as an ideal
type. Goal-oriented rational action was the most important type
of social action; it served as the model with which all other
forms of social action were compared. Weber listed these in
the following order: (1) that which more or less approximated
to the attained correct type (Richtigkeitstypus), (2) the (sub-
jective) goal-oriented rational type; (3) the more or less con-
scious or apparent, and more or less well-defined goal-oriented
rational action; (4) that which was not goal-oriented rational
but was similarly understandable in an analogous context; (5)
that which was more or less similarly motivated in its sense but
more or less strongly distorted by the invasion of incomprehen-
sible elements; and, finally, (6) that in which quite unintelli-
gible psychic or physical facts were linked ‘with’ and ‘in’ a
person through imperceptible transitions. *

This scale was constructed, clearly, on the principle of com-
paring any action of the individual with a goal-oriented (or
legitimately oriented) rational action. The goal-oriented rational
action was the most understandable—its degree of obviousness
was maximum. As an action became less rational, and less and
less understandable, its direct obviousness became less and less.
And although the boundary line separating a goal-oriented ra-
tional action from the irrational could never be established hard
and fast in reality, and although a very considerable part of all
sociologically relevant behaviour, especially purely traditional
behaviour, is marginal between the two,?* the sociologist
should start from goal-oriented rational action as an ideal-type
one, treating other types of human behaviour as deviations from
the ideal type.

There is thus understanding in pure form, according to
Weber, where we are faced with a goal-oriented rational action.

269

He himself considered that it was impossible, in this case, to
speak of psychological understanding, since the sense of the
action and its goal lay beyond the realm of psychology. But let
us ask a different question. What exactly do we understand in
the case of a goal-oriented rational action? The sense of the
action or of the actor himself? Assume that we see a person
cutting wood in a forest. We can conclude that he is doing it
either for pay or in order to lay in fuel for himself for the
winter, and so on. Arguing in that way we try to understand the
sense of the action and not of the person. But the operation it-
self might also serve us as a means of analysing the person him-
self. The difficulty that arises here is very material. For if sociol-_
ogy endeavours to understand the person who acts, then any
action figures for it as a sign of something, in reality quite dif-
ferent, that the individual himself does not guess or tries to
hide (from others or even himself). Such was the approach to
understanding the action of the individual of, for example,
Freud’s psychoanalysis.

Weber did not rule out the possibility of such an approach in
principle. The whole, essential part of Verstehen psychology
consisted, according to him, just in bringing out the not ade-
quately observed or unobserved connections (and in that sense
not rationally oriented ones), which nevertheless turned out to
be actually objectively ‘rationally’ understandable connections
in their aim. Leaving out of account that part of the work of
‘so-called psychoanalysis’, a construction like Nietzsche’s theory
of resentment, for instance, led to objective rationality of
outward behaviour, proceeding from certain interests. That had
been done methodologically, incidentally, decades earlier by the
theory of economic materialism.”*° Weber clearly did not rule
out such an approach to the examination of social phenomena
but considered it necessary to point out its problematic nature
and therefore the need to limit it and to employ it only sporadi-
cally as a subsidiary means. He saw its problematic nature in
the goal-oriented and legitimately-oriented rational’s not being
clearly related to one another subjectively. Weber had in mind
the following very serious complication that arose with a
‘psychological’ approach. When the individual himself was clear-
ly aware of the goal he set himself, and only tried to hide it
from others, that was readily understandable; such a situation

270

could fit fully into the scheme of goal-oriented rational behav-
iour. But when it was a matter of an action in which the indi-
vidual did not realise his own aims (and it was just such actions
that psychoanalysis investigated) then the question arose wheth-
er the investigator had sufficient grounds to claim that he
understood the acting person better than the latter understood
himself. In fact one should not, after all, forget that the method
of psychoanalysis arose from the practice of treating the mental-
ly ill, in respect of whom the doctor considered himself to
understand their condition better than they themselves did. For
he was a healthy person, and they were sick. But on what grounds
could he apply this method to other healthy people? There
could only be one basis for that, namely a conviction that they,
too, were ‘ill’. But the concept of ‘illness’ was then transferred
from the sphere of medicine to the general social one, to the
treatment of society as a whole.

It is obviously just such considerations that compelled Weber
to limit the sphere of application of that sort of approach to
social and histrorical research. But then how, after all, did he
himself answer the question of understanding? What precisely
did we understand in the case of a goal-oriented rational action?
The sense of the action? Or of the acting person himself? Weber
therefore chose as the ideal-type model a goal-oriented rational
action in which both these elements coincided; to understand
the sense of the action meant in that case to understand the
person’s meaning, while to understand him meant to understand
the sense of his act. Weber considered that coincidence the ideal
case from which sociology should start. These two elements
actually did not usually coincide, but science could not, accord-
ing to Weber, start from the empirical fact: it had to create an
idealised space for itself, and that ‘space’, for sociology, was the
goal-oriented rational action.

5. The Goal-Oriented Rational Action as
a Methodological Category of Weber’s Sociology

Since, however, Weber considered a goal-oriented rational
action an ideal type, he rightly declared that the ‘rationalistic’
character of his method did not presuppose a rationalistic

271

treatment of social reality itself. Goal-oriented rationality was
only a methodological precept of sociology, according to him,
and not an ‘ontological’ one; it was a means of analysing reality,
but not a characteristic of that reality itself. He specially stressed
this element.

Although he took care to differentiate the goal-oriented
rational action as a constructed ideal type from empirical real-
ity, yet the problem of the relation of an ideal-type construct
and empirical reality was far from as simple as might have been
thought, and Weber himself did not have an unambiguous
answer. However much he wanted to divide these two spheres
once and for all, the sharpness of the division disappeared at
the very first attempt to work with ideal-type constructs. We
have already seen, in general form, the difficulty that arose
here for him.

What premisses important for sociological theory did a
goal-oriented rational action contain? By selecting it as a method-
ological basis for sociology Weber dissociated himself from
those sociological theories that took social ‘totalities’ as their
initial reality, i.e., ‘people’, ‘society’, ‘state’, ‘economy’. In
that connection he sharply criticised ‘organic sociology’, which
regarded the individual as a part, a ‘cell’, of some social organ-
ism. He resolutely objected to treating society on a biological
model; the concept of organism could only be a metaphor in
regard to society, and no more.

For other cognitive purposes it may be convenient or necessary to
consider the individual, for instance, as a collection of cells, as a
complex of biochemical reactions, or to conceive his ‘psychic’ life
as made up of a variety of different elements, however these may be
defined... For sociology in the present sense, and for history, the
object of cognition is the subjective meaning-complex of action.” ®

The organistic approach to study of society abstracted itself
from the fact that man is a being who acts consciously. The
analogy between the individual and the cell of a body (or an
organ) was only possible on condition that the factor of con-
sciousness was recognised as non-essential. Weber objected to
that, putting forward a model of social action that accepted
this factor as essential. And since he declared it to be a neces-

sary premisse of sociology, he started in his researches from the
individual rather than the social ‘whole’. ‘Action in the sense of
a subjectively understandable orientation of behaviour exists
only as the behaviour of one or more individual human beings’
[italics added].?”

The principle of ‘understanding’ was thus a criterion for
separating the sphere relevant for sociology from what could
not be the subject-matter of sociological study. We understand
the behaviour of the individual, but not the behaviour of a cell.
We also do not ‘understand’ (in Weber’s sense of the term)
the ‘action’ of a nation or of the national economy, although
we can fully understand the action of the individuals who make
up a nation (or who are involved in the economy). That is why
Weber said that

such concepts as ‘state’, ‘association’, ‘feudalism’, and the like,
designate certain categories of human interaction. Hence it is the
task of sociology to reduce these concepts to ‘understandable’
action, that is, without exception, to the actions of participating
individual men.” °

Such an approach was obligatory for sociology, according to
him, but was not for all the sciences of man in general. Jurispru-
dence, for example, could regard the state or some collective,
in certain circumstances, as a ‘legal person’, but sociology had
no right to do so. Its approach presupposed treating even such
social formations as law only in the form in which they were
refracted through the goal-oriented rational action (and so
through the consciousness) of a separate individual. In so far
as ‘law’ became the object of investigation by sociology, the lat-
ter was not dealing with the mediation of the logically correct
‘objective’ content of legal principles, but was concerned with
the action of the individual among determinants and results of
which the person’s ideas of the ‘sense’ and ‘meaning’ of
certain legal principles played a significant role.?°

Sociology should thus study social institutions (law, the
state, religion, etc.), according to Weber, in the form in which
they became significant for separate individuals, to which the
latter were really oriented in their actions. But that meant that
the stigma of ‘metaphysics’ always present in social doctrines
that took these institutions as their starting point (as a ‘whole-

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18-1147

ness’ in general) was removed. This stigma was inevitably felt
in social theories created from the methodological premisses of
realism in the mediaeval sense. To that point of view Weber
counterposed a requirement of starting in sociology from the
actions of separate individuals. His position could be charac-
terised on those grounds as nominalist, but that would not be
a wholly adequate description. He posed the requirement of
starting from the individual action as a principle of knowledge
and understanding, and because of his neo-Kantian orientation
the characteristic of the principles of knowledge was by no
means at the same time one of social reality itself. Reality was
plastic in the sense that it could also be studied in other ways,
whose results could be a science different from sociology, for
example, jurisprudence or political economy. Consequently,
Weber did not claim, when speaking of an individual goal-
oriented rational action that it was a characteristic of the reality
of social life itself; he employed it as an ideal type seldom en-
countered in pure form in reality. It would therefore be best to
speak of Weber’s methodological nominalism, or rather his
methodological individualism.

But methodological individualism, of course, has _ its
ontological implications. By postulating goal-oriented rational
action as his starting point, Weber opposed treating conscious-
ness as an epiphenomenon.?° His basic methodological starting
point could be formulated as follows: a person knows himself
what he wants. In reality, of course, he by no means always
knows what he wants, for a goal-oriented rational action is an
ideal case. But the sociologist should start precisely from this
ideal case as a theoretical-methodological premisse.

Allowing for the ontological implications we noted above,
which are presupposed by the methods concept of social action,
one can conclude that Weber’s methodological principles were
closely linked with his understanding of history. For him social
life was the interaction of individual people, and although he
himself constantly stressed the exceptional methodological
importance of his ideal-type constructs, we must nevertheless
state that his methodological individualism was inextricably
bound up with the individualism of his outlook and with his
treatment of society as the interaction of individuals, ie., with
sociological nominalism.

274

6. Social Action and ‘Orientation to Another’
—‘Expectation’

Weber considered orientation of the acting person to another
individual (or other individuals) as the second obligatory ele-
ment of social action. Explaining precisely what orientation
was involved here, he wrote:

Social action, which includes both failure to act and passive acqui-
escence, may be oriented to the past, present, or expected future
behaviour of others. Thus it may be oriented by revenge for a past
attack, defence against present, or measures of defence against fu-
ture aggression. The ‘others’ may be individual persons, and may be
known to the actor as such, or may constitute an indefinite plurality
and may be entirely unknown as individuals. Thus ‘money’ is a
means of exchange which the actor accepts in payment because
he orients his action to the expectation that a large but unknown
number of individuals he is personally unacquainted with will be
ready to accept it in exchange on some future occasion.??

The introduction of the concept ‘orientation to another’
into sociology was an attempt to find something universal
within methodological individualism and by means of it, and
to pay attention to the substance of the social (if one can so
express it), without which goal-oriented rational action remains
a classical example of Crusoism. The authors of ‘Crusoades’
(or ‘Robinsonades’, as Marx called them) did not envisage any
‘orientation to another’ in the actions of individuals; for them
the action of the individual rested on individual ‘interest’ (it
was no accident that it was Robinson Crusoe that served as a
model of ‘Homo oekonomicus’). Sociology begins, according to
Weber, where it is found that economic man is too simplified
a model of human being.

But the question can arise here of why Weber needed such a
roundabout way to come to recognition of the existence of the
‘universal’. The point is that only in this way could he show in
what form the ‘universal’ operated for sociology. It should not
treat ‘sociality’ apart from and outside individuals; there should
not be even a shadow of substantiation of the social. The
‘universal’ existed only to the extent that and in so far as it was

275
18*

recognised by separate individuals, and orientated their real
behaviour. Weber explained that the existence of such collectiv-
ities as ‘state’ or ‘union’ meant nothing else, from the stand-
point of sociology, than a greater or less chance of the individu-
al’s taking them into account in his actions. When this chance
was reduced, the existence of a given institution became more
problematic; reduction of this chance to nought meant the end
of a given institution (state, legal, etc.).

Weber’s category of ‘orientation to the others’ undoubtedly
owed its origin to the field of law and was a sociological inter-
pretation of ‘admission’ or ‘confession’— a key concept of ju-
risprudence and the philosophy of law.

The sociology of law was thus not only one of the special
sections of Weber’s sociology: he explained ‘admission’, which
constituted a very important principle of jurisprudence, as a
constituent element of any social action in general.

The problem of the forms of dominance in Weber’s theory
acquires particular importance; it comes out in the form of the
question of the ‘legitimacy of power’ and in general of the prob-
lem of ‘legitimacy’. But one must note that the problem of
‘legitimacy’ and correspondingly ‘recognition’, did not get an
unambiguous and consistent solution. It was always closely
linked, both in jurisprudence and in social philosophy, with the
idea of ‘natural law’. As for Weber, he considered ‘natural law’
a value postulate that had no place in sociology, since the latter
aimed to be an empirical science and so should be free of values.
The task of the theoretical substantiation of categories like
‘expectation’, ‘recognition’, and ‘legitimacy’ remained in the
end unsolved.??

The existence of a subjective sense and orientation to others
were thus two necessary attributes of social action. Not every
action, as Weber stressed, could be called social in accordance
with that definition. If an individual’s action was oriented, for
instance, to expectation of a certain ‘behaviour’ from a material
object (machine, natural phenomenon, etc.), rather than from
other individuals, it could not be called social in the sense
accepted by Weber. In the same way the religious action of an
individual who gave himself up to contemplation, solitary
prayer, etc., was not a social action. The economic activity of an
individual only became a social action when attention was paid

276

to another individual (or individuals) during the distribution or
disposal of certain economic goods, and the action was oriented
to them. The action of many individuals could not be considered
social, for example, if it was determined by the character and
content of an orientation to some natural phenomenon.

Weber did not consider the purely imitative action performed
by an individual as an atom of the mass or crowd, described
in particular by Gustave Le Bon, to be social; he considered
it the subject of study of ‘mass psychology and not of sociolo-
gy, although the latter could, according to him, treat the actions
of many persons, and not just of one individual, but it did so
on the model of the individual, bringing out the subjectively
intended meaning of the actions of the individuals making up
the collective, and their mutual orientation to each other and
to a ‘third’.

As a historian and a sociologist Weber, of course, under-
stood that mass actions were an important object of study by the
sociologist, but his specific angle presupposed allowance (ac-
cording to Weber for the sense relation between the behaviour
of the individual and the fact of his becoming part of the mass,
i.e., more simply, the sociologist had to understand what sub-
jectively intended sense linked the individual with others, and
on what basis people were united in a mass. An action whose
course had been affected by the simple fact of mass purely as
such, and had only been reactively determined by that fact, was
not a ‘social action’ in the sense developed here.

Weber claimed, consequently, that as soon as the individual
who was an ‘atom’ of the mass realised his being part of the
mass, a gap appeared between him and his ‘belonging to the
mass’; that circumstance would also be determinant for the
structure of the mass itself. Weber’s sociological approach to
mass movements differed essentially on this point from the
socio-psychological one proposed, in particular, by Le Bon. The
latter approached the phenomenon of the mass or crowd as a
psychologist. He tried to single out what was general in any
crowd, be it a revolutionary mass on the streets of Paris, or a
pack of Roman soldiers, a throng of spectators in a theatre, or
a host of crusaders. In fact a certain community of behaviour
could be observed in any ‘crowd’, whatever the social composi-
tion of the individuals making it up, and whatever their intel-

277

lectual level; what a crowd had in common with any other
crowd would be that in its behaviour which was determined
purely actively and spontaneously. But what distinguished one
type of crowd from another and what should be studied, ac-
cording to Weber, by the sociology of the crowd, rather than by
its psychology, did not come within the purview of social
psychology. The object of sociology on that point should be
not so much the direct behaviour of the mass as its meaningful
result. The character of a mass movement, largely determined
by the sense orientations that guided the individuals consti-
tuting the mass, affected (with greater or less deviations) the
character of the religious, political, economic and other insti-
tutions that were built up during these movements, and as a
result of them. Weber tried to realise his method of analysis
of mass movements in the sociology of religion, law, and poli-
tics.

7. Types of Social Action

By examining Weber’s differentiation of types of action we can
understand how the ‘ideal model’ of goal-oriented rational
action was applied. He indicated four types of action: goal-
oriented rational (zweckrational), value-oriented rational
(wertrational), affectual, and traditional.

Social action [he wrote], like other modes of action, may be classi-
fied in the following four types according to mode of orientation:
(1) in terms of rational orientation to a system of descrete individu-
al ends (zweckrational), that is, through expectations as to the
behaviour of objects in the external situation and of other human
individuals, making use of these expectations as ‘conditions’ or
‘means’ for the successful attainment of the actor’s own rationally
chosen ends; (2) in terms of rational orientation to an absolute
value (wertrational), involving a conscious belief in the absolute
value of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behav-
iour, entirely for its own sake and independently of any prospects
of external success; (3) in terms of affectual orientation, especially
emotional, determined by the specific affects and states of feeling
of the actor; (4) traditionally oriented, through the habituation of
long practice.**

One must immediately draw attention to the point that the
last two types of action — affectual and traditional—are not
social actions in the proper sense, since we are not dealing
here with a conscious meaning or sense. Weber himself remarked
that

strictly traditional behaviour, like the reactive type of imitation
discussed above, lies very close to the borderline of what can justi-
fiably be called meaningfully oriented action. For it is very often
a matter of almost automatic reaction to habitual stimuli which
guide behaviour in a course which has been repeatedly followed.**

Only value-oriented and goal-oriented rational actions are
social actions in Weber’s meaning of the term.

Examples of pure rational orientation to absolute values [he wrote]
would be the action of persons who, regardless of possible cost to
themselves, act to put into practice their convictions of what seems
to them to be required by duty, honour, the pursuit of beauty, a
teligious call, personal loyalty, or the importance of some ‘cause’
no matter in what it consists. ... When action is oriented ... to ful-
filment of such unconditional demands ... it will be described as
oriented to absolute values. * *

In the case of value-oriented rational and affectual actions the
aim of the action is itself and not something else (result, success,
etc.); the secondary consequences (side-effects) in both cases
are not taken into account.

Unlike value-oriented rational action, the last, fourth type
~goal-oriented rational action— is amenable to subdivision in all
respects.

Action is rationally oriented [Weber considered] to a system of
discrete individual needs (zweckrational) when the end, the means,
and the secondary results are all rationally taken into account and
weighed. This involves rational consideration of alternative means
to the end, of the relations of the end to other prospective results

279

of employment of any given means, and finally of the relative
importance of different possible ends.**°

As will be seen, these four types of action were listed by
Weber in order of increasing rationality: whereas traditional
and affectual actions could be called subjectively irrational
(objectively both could be rational), a value-oriented rational
action already contained a subjectively rational element, since
the actor consciously related his act to a definite value as goal;
but this type of action was only relatively rational, since the
value itself was taken without further mediation and substan-
tiation and no attention was paid in the result to the side-
effects of the act. Only a goal-oriented rational action was
absolutely rational in the sense established by Weber, when it
occurred in pure form.

An individual’s actually performed conduct, Weber said, was
oriented, as a rule, in accordance with two or more forms of
action; there were goal-oriented and value-oriented rational
elements in it, and also affectual and traditional ones. One or
other of these forms of action could be predominant in differ-
ent types of society; traditional and affectual types of orien-
tation predominated in traditional societies, and goal- and value-
oriented rational activity in an industrial society, with a tenden-
cy toward the former type’s ousting of the latter.

In introducing the category of social action Weber could
not, however, resolve the difficulties that arose in connection
with its application. These were (1) the difficulty of defining
the subjectively implied sense of the action. In trying to define
more exactly what ‘sense’ was implied here, Weber tired himself
out for years developing the category of sociological ‘under-
standing’ but never managed to rid himself fully of psycholo-
gism.?”

(2) The category of social action, as the initial ‘cell’ of social
life, did not make it possible to understand the results of social
processes that did not entirely coincide with the direction of
individual actions. Since Weber broke the social whole down
into its individual psychological components, and treated each
of them separately, unconnected with the whole, he was unable
to reconstruct the general historical perspective.

280

wa

8. Formal Rationality as a Category of
Weber’s Sociology

It was not fortuitous that Weber put the four types of social
action he described in order of increasing rationality; that
order was not simply a methodological technique convenient
for explanation; he was convinced that rationalisation of social
action was the trend of history itself. And although history did
not happen without ‘impediments’ and ‘deviations’, the Europe-
an history of recent centuries and the ‘drawing’ of other, non-
European civilisations onto the road of the industrialisation
taking place in the West, were evidence, according to him, that
rationalisation was a universal historical process.

One of the most important aspects of the process of ‘rationaliza-
tion’ of action [he wrote] is the substitutions for the unthinking
acceptance of ancient custom, of deliberate adaptation to situations
in terms of self-interest. To be sure, this process by no means
exhausts the concept of rationalization of action. For in addition
this can proceed in a variety of other directions; positively in that
of a conscious rationalization of ultimate values; and, finally, in
favour of a morally sceptical type of rationality, at the expense of
any belief in absolute values. **

What did the growing role of goal-oriented rational action
mean from the standpoint of society as a whole? The ways of
running the economy was rationalised; management was ration-
alised—both in the economy and in politics, science, and culture,
ie., in all spheres of public affairs; people’s way of thinking
was rationalised, and likewise their way of feeling and way of
life as a whole. All that was accompanied with growth of the
social role of science, which was, according to Weber, the pur-
est embodiment of the principle of rationalisation. Science
first penetrated production (industry) and then management,
and finally everyday life as well; and Weber saw evidence in that
of the universal rationalisation of modern society.

Rationalisation, according to him, was the result of uniting
a number of historical factors that had predetermined the devel-
opment of Europe over the past 300 or 400 years. He did not
examine this constellation of factors as something previously

281

predetermined; it was rather a kind of historical accident, so
that rationalisation, from his point of view, was not so mucha
necessity of historical development as its fate and destiny.
It happened because, at a certain time, and in a certain area
of the world, several phenomena were encountered that includ-
ed a rational principle; the science of antiquity, particularly
mathematics, supplemented during the Renaissance by experi-
ment, which acquired the character (from the time of Galileo)
of a new experimental science internally linked with technique;
rational Roman law, which the previous types of society had
not known, and which was developed further on European soil
in the Middle Ages; the rational mode of running the economy
that had arisen through the separation of labour from the means
of production, on the soil of what Marx had called ‘abstract
labour’, i.e., labour amenable to quantitative measurement. The
factor that made it possible to synthesise, as it were, all these
elements was, according to Weber, Protestantism, which created
the ideological preconditions for realising a rational mode of
carrying on business (primarily through introduction of the
advances of science into the economy and their transformation
into a productive force), since economic success was elevated
to a religious calling by the Protestant ethic.

A new type of society that had never existed before arose
as a result for the first time in Europe, and therefore had no
analogy, the society that present-day sociologists call indus-
trial. Weber called all previously existing types of society tradi-
tional, in contrast to modern. Their most important attribute
was that the formal rational principle was not dominant in
them. What was this principle?

Formal rationality was primarily calculability, and the for-
mally rational was that which was amenable to quantitative
calculation, which exhausted the quantitative characteristic
without a remainder.

The term ‘formal rationality of economic action’ will be used to
designate the extent of quantitative calculation on accounting which
is technically possible and which is actually applied. The ‘substan-
tive rationality’, on the other hand, is the degree to which a given
group of persons, no matter how it is delimited, is or could be ade-
quately provided with goods by means of an economically oriented

282

course of social action. This course of action will be interpreted in

terms of a given set of ultimate values no matter what they may
be.??

In other words, an economy guided by certain criteria that lay
outside what could be calculated, and which Weber called ‘sub-
stantive postulates’, ie., an economy that served ends not
determined by itself, was characterised as ‘materially (substan-
tively) determined’. ‘Substantive’ rationality was rationality
for something; formal rationality was rationality ‘not for some-
thing’, rationality in itself, taken as an end in itself. But it
should not be forgotten that the concept of formal rationality
was an ideal type, and was very seldom encountered in pure
form in empirical reality. Yet the movement toward formal
rationality, as Weber showed in many of his works, was a move-
ment of history itself. ‘Substantive rationality’ had prevailed in
previous types of society, but in modern society it was formal
rationality, which corresponded to predominance of the goal-
directed rational type of activity over all others.

Weber was not original in his theory of formal rationality
and about the difference of the modern type of society from
traditional- ones in precisely this respect; what he designated
a formal rationality had been discovered by Marx, and figured
in his works as the concept ‘abstract labour’.*° The concept
played a different role in the structure of Marx’s thought from
Weber’s formal rationality, but there is no doubt of Marx’s in-
fluence on him on this point.*! For Marx the most important
indicator of abstract labour was that it ‘has no particular quality
and can thus be measured only in terms of quantity’.*? A pure-
ly quantitative characteristic of labour had become possible,
according to him, only in capitalist society, which created ‘the
bourgeois form of labour as distinct from its antique and me-
diaeval forms’.43 The peculiarity of this labour was above all
its abstract universality, ie., its indifference as regards the
definite form of the product it created, and so in regard to what
needs its product satisfied. Marx’s definition of abstract, univer-
sal labour recorded the fact of the transformation of labour into
a means of creating wealth in general. Man and his needs thus
became, as he showed, only a means, an element, needed for the
normal course of production.

283

The most essential characteristic of Weber’s formal rational-
ity was similar, as Karl Lowith has stressed, and was that the
mode of management had become so independent that it no
longer had any manifest relation to human needs as such.**
Formal rationality was a principle to which not only the
modern economy was subordinated but also, in tendency, the
whole aggregate of the vital directions of modern society.

The theory of formal rationality was, in essence, Weber’s
theory of capitalism. It is necessary to note the close link be-
tween his methodology, in particular the theory of social action,
and the distinguishing of types of action, on the one hand, and
his theory of the genesis of capitalism, on the other. In fact he
stressed that when the investigator created an ideal-type con-
struct, he was guided in the last analysis by the ‘interest of the
age’, which set the ‘direction of view’ for him. The age set
Weber, as the central problem, what modern capitalist society
was, what were its origin and path of development, what was
the lot of the individual in that society, and how it realised, or
would realise in the future, the ideals that had been proclaimed
by its ideologists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
as the ‘ideals of reason’. The character of the question prede-
termined Weber’s set of methodological techniques. The type of
‘social action’ was created, in particular that of goal-oriented
rational action, which served as the reference point for con-
structing other types of action. Characteristically, Weber himself
considered the behaviour of the individual in the economic
sphere to be the purest empirical example of goal-oriented ration-
al action. And it was not fortuitous that he cited examples of
goal-oriented rational action, as a rule, from it: either the
exchange of goods, or competitive struggle on the market, or
playing the stock exchange, etc. Correspondingly, when tradi-
tional societies were referred to he remarked that the goal-
oriented rational type of action was met in them mainly in the
economic sphere.

The problem of the fate of capitalism thus conditioned
Weber’s ‘methodological individualism’. So he had a quite
definite social stance, coming forward in his sociology as an ex-
ponent of the ideology and interests of the capitalist class.

284

9. Weber’s Theory of Types of Domination

Weber’s theory of ‘rationalisation’ was very closely linked with
his understanding of social action. His sociology of authority
was no less closely linked with the category of social action.
He considered ‘orientation to another’ an inseparable element of
social action, and as nothing other than the category of ‘recog-
nition’ traditional for jurisprudence. When this category was
freed of the normative significance it had in jurisprudence, and
of the ‘metaphysical’ meaning it had in theories of ‘natural
law’, we got precisely the concept of ‘expectation’ that Weber
thought necessary for sociological study of society. This
concept was very important in his theory of types of legitimate
domination, i.e., of the domination recognised by the governed
individuals. His definition of domination was characteristic:
the chance to get obedience for a definite order or command.**
It thus presupposed a mutual expectation: by him who ordered
that his command would be carried out, and by those who
obeyed that the command would have the character which they
expected, ie., recognised. Weber began his analysis of legitimate
types of domination, in full accordance with his methodology,
with an examination of possible (typical) ‘motives of obed-
ience’.*® He found three of such motives and accordingly distin-
guished three pure types of domination.

Domination (Herrschaft) could be governed by interests,
i.e., goal-directed rational considerations of the obeying persons
about its advantages or disadvantages; it could be governed,
furthermore, by simple ‘usage’ and a habit of certain obedience;
and finally it could be based on the simple personal disposition
of the dominated, i.e., could be really affectively based on the
simple, personal disposition of the governed.*”

The first type of domination (Weber called it ‘legal’) thus
had a sense of interest as ‘a motive of compliance’; it was based
on a goal-directed rational action. He classed the modern capital-
ist countries (Great Britain, France, the United States, etc.)
in this type. In them, he stressed, there was subordination not
to an individual personality but to established laws, and not
only the governed were subordinated to them but also the gov-
ernors (officials). The apparatus of administration consisted
of specially trained officials who were required to act ‘without

285

respect of persons’, i.e., according to strictly formal, rational
tules. The formal, legal principle was the one underlying ‘legal
domination’; and it was this principle, according to him, that
was one of the necessary preconditions of the development of
modern capitalism as a system of formal rationality.

Bureaucracy, Weber said, was technically the purest type
of legal domination, but no domination could be only bureau-
cratic. At the top of the ladder stood either a hereditary
monarch, or a president elected by the people, or leaders elected
by a parliamentary corporation, he wrote.*® But the everyday,
continuous work was carried on by specialist officials, i.e., by
an administrative machine, whose activity could not be stopped
without causing a serious breakdown in the functioning of the
social machinery.

The official who corresponded to the ‘rational’ type of state,
had to have a special education, in addition to legal training,
since competence was required of him. Here is how Weber de-
scribed the pure type of rational bureaucratic administration:

The whole administrative staff under the supreme authority then
consists, in the purest type, of individual officials who are appoint-
ed and function according to the following criteria:

(1) They are personally free and subject to authority only with
tespect to their impersonal official obligations.

(2) They are organized in a clearly defined hierarchy of offices.

(3) Each office has a clearly defined sphere of competence in
the legal sense.

(4) The office is filled by a free contractual relationship. Thus,
in principle, there is free selection.

(5) Candidates are selected on the basis of technical qualifica-
tions... They are appointed, not elected.

(6) They are remunerated by fixed salaries in money, for the
most part with a right to pensions...

(7) The office is treated as the sole, or at least the primary,
occupation of the incumbent.

(8) It constitutes a career. There is a system of ‘promotion’
according to seniority or to achievement, or both. Promotion is
dependent on the judgment of superiors.

(9) The official works entirely separated from ownership of the
means of administration and without appropriation of his position.

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7:

(10) He is subject to strict and systematic discipline and control
in the conduct of the office.*®

This type of domination corresponded most closely, accord-
ing to him, to the formal, rational structure of the economy
that had become established in Western Europe and the USA at
the end of the nineteenth century; there was the same special-
isation and division of labour as in industry; the official was
‘separated from the means of administration’ just like the pro-
ducer from the means of production. ‘Bureaucratic adminis-
tration means fundamentally the exercise of control on the basis
of knowledge. This is the feature of it which makes it specially
rational.’>°

The ideal type of formal, rational administration described
by Weber was undoubtedly an idealisation of the real state of
affairs; it did not, and does not have an empirical realisation
in any modern capitalist state. He essentially had in mind, here,
the machinery of administration (machinery in the literal sense);
it could not in fact have any interests except ‘the good of the
office’ and it was not prone to corruption. He considered that
no machinery in the world could work so punctually and exact-
ly, and as cheaply as this human machine.*!

But the administrative machine, like any other, needed a
programme. And only a political leader (or leaders) who could
set it definite aims, could give it a programme, in other words,
someone who put the formal machinery of administration at the
service of definite political values. The separation of ‘science’
and ‘values’ typical of Weber’s methodology found another
application in his sociology of domination.

The other type of legitimate domination, governed by ‘morals,
and habituation to a certain obedience’, Weber called tradi-
tional. Traditional authority was based not only on belief in
legality and the rule of law but also on the sanctity of eternally
existing order and powers; it was based, consequently, on tradi-
tional action. For him its purest form was patriarchalism. The
union of the rulers (dominant) was the community (Gemein-
schaft), the type of the chief was the ‘lord’, the staff of the admin-
istration—the ‘servants’, the subordinates ‘subjects’ who served
the lord out of piety.°? He stressed that the patriarchal type of
authority was in many respects similar in its structure to the

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structure of the family.*? (It was that circumstance which made

this type of legitimacy, which was characteristic of this type of
5 =)

domination, particularly firm and stable.

The administrative apparatus in this type of authority
consisted of domestic servants, relatives, and personal friends
personally dependent on the lord, or vassals personally sworn
to him. In all cases it was personal fidelity that served as the
grounds for appointment to an office and for promotion up the
hierarchical ladder, and not service discipline or business compe-
tence as in the type of domination examined above. Since there
were no limits to the will and power of the lord the hierarchical
chain was often broken by privileges.

Weber distinguished two forms of traditional domination:
purely patriarchal, and an estate structure of administration.
In the former the ‘servants’ were wholly dependent personally
on the lord, though people could be drawn into the administra-
tion from quite rightless strata of the population, along with
close relatives and friends of the lord; that type of traditional
authority was met, for example, in Byzantium. In the second
type the ‘servants’ were not personally dependent and their
administration was to some extent ‘autocephalic’ and autono-
mous; here the principle of noble honour operated, which could
not be said of administration under the patriarchal structure.
The feudal states of Western Europe were closest to this type.
Administration through patrimonial dependents (slaves, serfs),
as in Asia Minor, and in Egypt down to the time of the Mame-
lukes, was an extreme and not always very consistent type of
estateless, purely patrimonial authority. Administration through
free plebeians was rather closer to rational bureaucracy. Admin-
istration through literary men (Literaten) could have a differ-
ent character, but it always approximated to the estate type:
Brahmins, mandarins, and Buddhist and Christian clerics.°5

An absence of formal law, and consequently a requirement to
act without respect of persons, was characteristic of the custom-
ary types of traditional authority; the character of relations in
any sphere was strictly personal; but, as Weber stressed, the
sphere of trade enjoyed a certain, though relative, freedom from
this purely personal principle in all types of traditional socie-
ty°®; there was always a traditional form of trade alongside free
trade.

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re

’

The third pure form of domination for Weber was what he
called charismatic authority. The concept of charisma or God’s
gift (from the Greek kharisma, show favour) played an impor-
tant role in his socioiogy; charisma, at least in accordance with
its etymology, was a kind of extraordinary capacity distinguish-
ing an individual from others and not so much acquired by
him (the main point) as given to him (by nature, god, or desti-
ny). Weber counted as charismatic qualities magical power, the
gift of prophecy, outstanding force of mind or word; heroes,
great generals, magicians, prophets and seers, artists of genius,
outstanding politicians, the founders of world religions
(Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed), and the founders of states (Solon
and Lycurgus), and great conquerors (Alexander the Great,
Caesar, and Napoleon) had charisma.*”

The charismatic type of legitimate domination was the direct
opposite of the traditional; whereas the traditional type was
supported by habit, attachment to the customary and the once
and for all established, the charismatic on the contrary relied on
something unusual, something not previously recognised. It was
not fortuitous, according to Weber, that the turn of phrase ‘It
is written ... but I say unto you’, was characteristic of the
prophet.>*® The affectual type of social action was the main
basis of charismatic domination. ‘In traditionally stereotyped
periods,’ he wrote, ‘charisma is the greatest revolutionary
force’>?, capable of introducing changes in the structure of
societies lacking in dynamism.

But, for all the differences and even the opposite nature of
the traditional and charismatic types of domination, there was
much in common between them, namely that both were based
on personal relations between lord and subjects. In that respect
both types were opposed to the formal, rational type of domi-
nation as impersonal. The source of personal devotion to the
charismatic lord was not tradition and not recognition of his
formal right, but an emotionally coloured devotion to him, and
faith in his charisma. That is why, Weber stressed, the charis-
matic leader must constantly demonstrate its presence. The
union of the dominant people, as in the previous case, was the
community, in which the teacher and his disciples, the leader
and his followers and supporters, etc., were united in accord-
ance with the character of the charisma. The administrative appa-

AON

19-1147

ratus constituted on the basis of the presence (in the adminis-
trator) of charisma and devotion to the leader; the rational
concept of ‘competence’ and the estate-traditional concept
‘privilege’ were quite absent here. The charismatic domination
differed from both the formal, rational and traditional types in
there being no rules in it (either rationally or traditionally estab-
lished): decisions on all matters were made irrationally, through
‘revelation or ... creation, action or example, decision from case
to case’®°.

The charismatic principle of legitimacy was authoritarian
in contrast to the formal, rational one. The authority of the
charismatic leader was based essentially on this force—only
not on crude, physical force (which, incidentally, was by no
means ruled out), but on the strength of his gift.

One must also note that Weber regarded charisma quite unre-
lated to the content of what the charismatic person proclaimed,
stood for or carried forth true to his principle that sociology
as a science should be free of values. He was emphatically indif-
ferent to the values introduced into the world by the charis-
matic person: Pericles, Cleon, Napoleon, Jesus, or Genghis Khan
were identical charismatic leaders from Weber’s point of view as
a sociologist of authority; the state or religious communities
created by them were varieties of the charismatic type of
domination.

Weber’s methodological principles ruled out the possibility of
differentiating the type of politician like Pericles, for example,
from the political demagogue of the type of Hitler, who relied
on suggestive, emotional forms of influencing the masses and
therefore fitted Weber’s definition of the charismatic person.
Since the sociologist, according to him, should be interested in
the objective result of a historical person’s actions and not in
the subjective difference (real religiosity, say, from pseudorelig-
iosity), his sociology necessarily involved a certain ambiguity.
This ambiguity played a negative role, independently of his
own political bias, in the complex socio-political situation
that arose in Germany after World War I during the Weimar
Republic.

290

10. The Contradictory Nature of
Weber’s Political Stance

I have already mentioned that legal domination, for Weber, had
a weaker legitimising force than either the traditional or the char-
ismatic. He pinned the legal type of domination on goal-orient-
ed rational action, i.e., on interests.

In its pure form legal domination thus had no value founda-
tion and therefore the formal, rational bureaucracy exercising
this type of domination should exclusively serve ‘the good of
the cause’, interests; its impersonal character corresponded to its
proposed ‘extra-value maxims’.

Weber treated the relations of domination in the ‘rational’
state on the analogy of those in the sphere of private enterprise
(the model of goal-oriented rational action was, after all, econom-
ic action). Relations in the economic sphere, according to
him, were the ‘cell’ from which the legal type of domination
developed. What was this ‘cell’?

The most general precondition of the rational economy of
modern capitalism, according to Weber, was the rational calcu-
lation of capital as the norm for all big industrial enterprises
working to meet everyday needs. It was the possibility of strict
accounting, and accounts control of an enterprise’s earning
power ard income by the casting of a balance, which emerged
only from a number of preconditions that had earlier not exist-
ed, that had opened the way to the development of a ‘rational’
economy. What were these specific preconditions?

They were (1) the acquisition of free ownership of material
means of production (land, instruments, machines, tools, etc.)
by autonomous, private industrialists; (2) a free market, i.e.,
freedom of the market from irrational restraints on exchange,
for example by guild restrictions; (3) a rational, i.e., strictly
calculated and therefore mechanised technique for both produc-
tion and exchange; (4) rational, i.e., firmly established law (for
the capitalist order to function the rational economy had to be
based on firm legal norms for the courts and administration);
(5) free labour, i.e., the existence of people who not only had
the right to sell their labour power on the market but were eco-
nomically compelled to do so; (6) a commercial organisation of
the economy, by which was understood broad use of securities

291
19*

to establish rights of participation in enterprises and rights to
property, in short, the possibility of an exclusive orientation on
covering needs by the market demand and income of the en-
terprise.

Most of the prerequisites of the capitalist economy listed by
Weber had a common element characterised as emancipation: of
the market from guild restrictions, of law from coalescence with
morals and customs,°? of the producer from the means of pro-
duction. It will readily be understood why these preconditions
were necessary so that there could be rational accounting of
capital; for accounting presupposed the possibility of converting
ali qualitative characteristics into quantitative ones, and every-
thing that was not amenable to such conversion figured as an
obstacle in the way of the development of a rational capitalist
economy.

In Weber’s understanding of it, rationality was formal, func-
tional rationality. Its full development required the rise of the
same functional type of administration, ie., a type free of any
meaningful (value) elements. He considered legal domination
such a type. But since formal rationality, like the pure type of
goal-oriented rational action corresponding to it, was not an end
in itself but a means for achieving some other end, legal authori-
ty did not have adequate legitimacy and had to be reinforced
by something else, either traditions or charisma. When this the-
sis is translated into political language, it sounds rather as fol-
lows: parliamentary democracy, recognised by liberalism as the
sole rightful legislative (legitimising) body in the legal type of
West European capitalist state, did not have adequate legitimis-
ing force in the eyes of the masses, and therefore had to be
supplemented either by a hereditary monarch (whose rights, of
course, were limited by parliament) or a plebiscitely elected
political leader.®? In the first case the legal domination’s legit-
imacy was strengthened by means of tradition, and in the sec-
ond by means of charisma. Weber himself came to the conclu-
sion in the last years of his life that it was necessary to supple-
ment parliamentary legitimacy precisely by plebiscitary legitim-
acy; a politician elected directly by all the people and not by
parliament, and having the right to appeal directly to the people
over the head of parliament, was needed as a political leader.
Only a plebiscite, he claimed, could give this political leader the

292

legitimacy that would allow him to pursue a definitely oriented
policy, i.e., to put the state bureaucratic machinery at the
service of certain values.

When we recall that charisma did not, in principle, admit of
any meaningful interpretation in Weber’s sociology, it is under-
standable that his political stance looks very ambiguous in the
light of the events that took place in Germany 13 years after his
death. And while some of the Western students of his work con-
sider that he theoretically forecast the development of totali-
tarian regimes in Europe and warned against the possibility of
them, others are inclined to blame him for having indirectly,
theoretically furthered the rise of those regimes.

Weber gave real grounds, in fact, for such evaluations; his
political stance, and likewise his theory of domination, were a
substantial departure from the position of classical liberalism,
represented theoretically in Germany, in particular, by neo-Kant-
ianism. This departure seems to come out most clearly, theoret-
ically, in the treatment of the legal capitalist state as a purely
functional formation needing legitimisation by ‘values’ external
to it.

The ambiguity of his stance was linked with his contradic-
tory attitude to the rationalist tradition. On the one hand, he
came out as a spokesman of rationalism. That showed both in
his methodology, oriented on meaningful, subjectively motivat-
ed individual action, and in his political views; from the 1890s
his political articles and speeches were aimed against the agrari-
an conservatism and ideology of the German Junkers to whom
he opposed a bourgeois-liberal position. His critique of the ro-
mantic irrationalism of the life philosophy fully corresponded
to his critique of the conservative Junkers in politics; and to his
rationalism in methodology there corresponded a conscious
defence of rationality as the main principle of capitalist econom-
ics.

Weber’s value attitude to rationalism as an ethical principle
showed particularly clearly in his preference for the ‘ethic of
responsibility’ (Verantwortungsethik) and the ‘ethic of convic-
tion’ (Gesinnungsethik). The former, which presupposed a so-
ber estimate of a situation, and a strictly rational formulation
of alternative possibilities, and conscious choice and unswerving
implementation of one of the possibilities, and also personal

293

responsibility for that choice, was always the guiding principle
of his own activity. He demanded that one be guided precisely
by that principle both in science (his ideal types were essentially
meant to give a strictly rational formulation of alternative,
mutually exclusive possibilities) and in politics; according to
him the ‘ethics of responsibility’ should be an obligatory essen-
tial quality of a political leader.

In his polemics against Roscher, Knies, and Mayer, Weber
himself pointed out the connection between the concept ‘ration-
ality’ and freedom—a ‘value’ most important for him. One was
free, according to him, when one’s activity was rational, i.e.,
when one was clearly aware of the aim pursued, and consciousky
selected means adequate to it. The ‘more freely’ an actor made a
decision, i.e., the more it depended on his own ‘considerations’
unsullied by any ‘outside’ compulsion or insurmountable ‘af-
fects’, the more the motivation was subordinated ceteris paribus
to the categories of ‘end’ and ‘means’, and the fuller its rational
analysis would consequently be, and its inclusion, where neces-
sary, in the scheme of rational activity.

He did not, however, completely share the principles of the
rationalist tradition. He did not recognise the ontological value
of rationalism, but only accepted its methodological signif-
icance; his tendency to divide methodology and ontology, on
the one hand, and methodology and ideology, on the other, was
itself due precisely to his certain distancing of himself from the
principle of rationality. This showed on the political plane in his
departure from classical liberalism, which came out primarily
when he was examining problems of political economy. The lat-
ter could not be oriented, he wrote, either to ethical, or to produc-
tion-technical, or to eudemonist ‘ideals’—it could and should be
oriented to ‘national’ ideals, and its goal should be the economic
strengthening and prosperity of the nation. The ‘nation’ also
figured with him as the highest political value. His ‘nationalism’,
it is true, did not have the same character as with German con-
servatives. He did not consider it possible to sacrifice the politi-
cal freedom of the individual for the sake of the ‘nation’; his
ideal was a combination of political freedom and _ national
might. A combination of political liberalism and nationalist
motives was characteristic in general of Germany, and Weber
was perhaps not an exception in that, but he gave the ideas of

294

‘nationalism’ a rather different substantiation than nineteenth-
century German liberalism.

The same duality was typical of Weber’s attitude to formal
rationality. The American sociologist Arthur Mitzman tried to
show in his Jron Cage that Weber’s attitude to formal rationality
changed substantially during his development. He considered
that whereas Weber was an adherent and supporter of rationali-
ty in the first period of his work, he subsequently, especially
during World War I and afterward, was inclined to be very criti-
cal of the principle of rationality, counterposing irrational cha-
risma to it.°? It seems to me that such a sharp evolution in
Weber’s work cannot be established, and that Mitzman’s ap-
proach simplifies the real picture. When we compare such works
of Weber’s as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(which belongs to the first period) and Science as a Calling
(from the last year of his life), one can find in both his ambiva-
lent attitude to the principle of rationality.°* One can really say
there was a change of accent. The mood of ‘heroic pessimism’
was weaker in the young Weber, and became stronger year by
year in his later life.

Weber riot only had a dual attitude to rationality, but a no
less dual one to its antipode, charisma, and also to ‘tradition’,
the most alien for him. That circumstance always paralysed him
as a politician; dualism affected him every time it was a matter
of an unambiguous response to some political situation: every
way out found today seemed to him tomorrow’s blind alley.
Those who knew his political temperament were convinced that
he preferred the activity of a professional politician to an aca-
demic career, but his private tragedy, as Wolfgang Mommsen has
justly noted, was that, although he was a born ‘doer’, his activi-
ty was always paralysed by reason.°*

11. The Sociology of Religion

The very marked ambiguity of Weber’s attitude to any ideal
type (rationality, charisma, tradition) affected his sociology of
teligion.

His studies in this field began with his The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) and completed by major his-
torical and sociological studies analysing world religions (Hindu-

295

ism, Buddhism ,Confucionism ,Taoism, Judaism, etc.). Two stages
can be distinguished in his work on problems of religion, differ-
ing not only in subject-matter but partly also in the direction
of his research interest. In the first stage, when he was working
on The Protestant Ethic, his interest in religion was limited
mainly to matters of what role had been played in the moulding
of modern capitalism by the change in the religious ethic due to
the rise and development of Protestantism, and more broadly in
realisation of the principle of rationality. The object of his
study therefore became the connection between religious-ethical
principles and forms of economic activity, his polemical feel
being directed in it against Marx’s conception of religion as a
product of economic relations. In essence, however, his polemic
had as its object the crude economic substantiation of religion,
rather than Marxism, since Marxism has always recognised a
feedback of spiritual factors on the economic structure of
society.

The theme discussed in The Protestant Ethic, viz., the con-
nection and mutual influence of religion and the economy, re-
tained its significance in Weber’s later studies of religion as well.
One of the main themes in his investigations of world religions
was how religious-ethical maxims and precepts influenced the
character and mode of realising economic activity, and mainly
the forms of its motivation, and how, furthermore, different
types of carrying on the economy ‘deformed’ religious-ethical
principles. His main means of analysis was comparison, which
was called for by his method of ideal typing. The degree of
rationalisation of economic activity permitted by one religious
ethic or another, was the primary, albeit not exclusive basis of
his comparison. The degree of rationalisation, he showed, was
inversely proportional to the strength and force of the magic
element present in varying degrees in any religion. The pair of
opposites ‘the rational—the magic’ was one of the tools of analy-
sis in his Economic Ethic of World Religions.®®

As Weber passed from the forming and development of
modern capitalism to the creation of sociology as a positive
empirical science of society, and as he contemplated the place
and role of the religious factor in the structure of a social forma-
tion, his sociology of religion pursued another objective, along
with its former one. He tried, by means of the sociology of reli-

06

=<

gion, to disclose the content of the category of social action:
the sociology of religion had subjectively implied meaning as its
own subject-matter. Whereas in the sociology of law and the
state he had analysed forms of ‘orientation to another’, in the
sociology of religion he tried to give a typology of the main
types of meaning as they figured in history. As a result the
sociology of religion became a central section of his sociology
as a whole.

Just as it was difficult to separate the elements in a real social
action from one another, i.e., ‘the subjectively implied meaning’
and ‘orientation to another’, so it. was also difficult to separate
the religious-ethical and state-legal formations so closely linked
with one another in history. But for purposes of analysis Weber
deliberately split them apart so as to clarify the ‘mechanism’ of
their connection for himself later during the investigation. It
was therefore no longer a matter, in this series of papers, just of
the relation of religion and the economy, but also of the rela-
tion of religion and the forms of power, religion and art, science,
philosophy, etc.

In spite of the broadening and deepening of the theme,
however, the. methodological means of analysis remained as
before; the standard for comparison was the same here as in
the other departments of his sociology, i.e., goal-oriented ration-
al action, and its purest version—economic action. Establishing
the type of religion’s link precisely with the economic ethic was,
as before, the most important means of analysis for Weber of
both religion itself and of its relation to law, the state, science,
art, etc.

He did not make the comparison on the basis of externally
fixed elements of religious action; that approach yielded little

as regards religious phenomena. Only understanding of the sense
of the actions performed, i.e., the motives of the acting individ-
uals, made a sociological analysis of religion possible. Before
all the types of religious behaviour were compared and classi-
fied, it was necessary to see the object that had to be compared
and classified. The role of the method of understanding and cog-
nition was particularly important in the sociology of religion.
While the construction of the ideal type brought Weber close to
positivism and nominalism, his principle of ‘understanding’
required, on the contrary, contemplation and ‘co-experiencing’

297

(which gives grounds for comparing his sociology of religion
with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and others.°”
It was that which permitted Pitirim Sorokin to claim that
Weber’s sociology of religion was essentially a sociology of cul-
ture as a whole. Weber’s approach to the study of religion dif-
fered from that of the French school (Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl,
and others), on the one hand, and from the English tradition
(running from Tylor to Frazer), on the other. Study of the
genesis of religion, and of its early forms, was primarily a
characteristic of both the French school and the British: it was
not by chance that both were attracted to the religious notions
of primitive societies and, starting from that, examined the
structure of religious consciousness as such, The British ethno-
graphers and students of religion, being guided by the principles
of evolutionism, did not think of understanding religion any
other way than by establishing its origins. Durkheim, who
considered the concepts of religion and sociality to be, generally
speaking, identical, analysed the problem of the origin and
essence of religion as identical with that of the origin and
essence of society; the significance he attached to studies of the
sociology of religion is therefore understandable.

While Weber did not make the origin of religion his central
problem, he also did not specially study the matter of its essence.
As Emst Cassirer correctly noted, Weber posed the question
of the pure ‘composition’ (Bestand) of religion in his sociology,
and not either its empirical or even its theoretical origin.°®

The external courses of religious behavior are so diverse that an
understanding of this behavior can only be achieved from the
viewpoint of the subjective experiences, ideas, and purposes of the
individuals concerned—in short, from the viewpoint of the reli-
gious behavior’s ‘meaning’ (Sinn).°°

Weber was also guided in the study of religion by the require-
ment of starting from the separate individual and his motives—
experiences, notions, aims. It is therefore understandable that,
unlike Durkheim, he stressed a quite different element of any
religion, including (and even above all) primitive religion, name-
ly magical and cult actions which always, according to him, had
a this-world goal. ‘The most elementary forms of behavior moti-

298

vated by religious or magical factors’, he wrote, ‘are oriented to
this world’,”° primarily to control the weather (to summon
rain, to stop a storm, and so on), to cure illness (including the
driving out or exorcising of evil spirits from the sick person’s
body), the forecasting of future events, etc. It was precisely
because a magical and ritual action had as its aim (in Weber’s
conviction) the achieving of certain quite this-worldly (and in
that sense rational) results, that he considered it possible to
classify this action as ‘relatively rational behavior’.”!

A second most important aspect of Weber’s sociology of reli-
gion was his concentration on the role of the individual’s unusu-
al, supernatural capabilities thanks to which he could be a ma-
gus, shaman, prophet, or founder of a new religion. These capac-
ities (individual charisma) were a vast social force, according
to him, but an irrational force that he counterposed to rational
factors. He thus treated charisma again as a factor referring to
the individual and requiring attention to be paid precisely to
individual behaviour as the cell of the social process.

Weber also selected the object of study in accordance with
his interests and method. He mainly studied the religions of de-
veloped societies, i.e., world religions that represented a compar-
atively high level of social differentiation, considerable intel-
lectual development, the emergence of a personality endowed
with clear self-awareness. Although the ritual, cult element had
its place in world religions the significance of dogmatic and ethi-
cal elements grew in comparison with ceremonial and ritual
ones, to the extent and as far as the group principle was weak-
ened in them and the individual singled out. And it was in this
that his methodology, which required analysis of the motives

| of the acting persons, found its appropriate object of study.

Weber established, from vast data on highly developed forms
of religious life, where and in what social conditions, and among
what social strata and professional and vocational groups the
titual-cult element predominated in religion, where the ascetic-
active principle, where the mystic-contemplative, and where the
intellectual-dogmatic. Thus, according to him, magical elements
were most characteristic of the religions of agricultural peoples,
and—within the context of highly developed cultures—of the
peasant estate; belief in destiny and fate constituted an attrib-
ute of the religion of conquerors and of the military caste; the

299

religion of urban estates, in particular of craftsmen, had a rational
character, these groups depending less than tillers on external,
natural conditions, and more on a rhythmically regular, rational-
ly organised labour process. But since world religions arose and
spread, as a rule, among more than one estate, a whole number
of various elements were present in peculiar combinations in
them.

When examining the individual image of world religious-ethi-
cal systems, Weber classified them in accordance with the social
strata that were precisely their main bearers or vectors: the bear-
er of Confucianism was the bureaucrat organising the’ world,
of Hinduism the magus regulating the world, of Buddhism the
contemplative monk wandering the world, of Islam the warrior
conquering the world, of Christianity the itinerant craftsman.

Weber paid special attention to the problem of pariahs, i.e.,
of groups that were on the lowest rungs, or were even quite out-
side the social hierarchy. While an orientation of interests to this
world, a striving to introduce order into it (Confucianism), or to
organise it (Hinduism), to enlighten and sanctify it (elements of
this striving to ‘sanctify’ could be found in the Catholic and
Orthodox versions of Christianity), were characteristic of the
most privileged, aristocratic strata, as a rule (but not exclusive-
ly), eschatological motives, and a striving for ‘the other world’
figured in the foreground of the ‘religions of pariahs’.

Weber showed, when analysing ‘the religious ethic of pariahs’
from the data of Judaism, especially the religion of the proph-
ets, and also of the various currents and sects within Christiani-
ty, that the bearers of the ‘religiosity of pariahs’ were never
slaves or free day-labourers, who were not in general active as
regards religion, according to him. He also did not think the
proletariat, contemporaneous with him, to be exceptions in that
respect.’ The most active, religiously, among the underprivi-
leged, according to him, were the petty craftsmen and artisans,
impoverished sons and daughters from more privileged strata
(for example, Russian lower middle-class intellectuals or razno-
chintsy, whose type of world outlook interested him very much).
But it should not be thought that eschatologism and an ‘other-
world orientation or religious interest’ ruled out intellectualism.
Weber discussed that theme specially and came to the conclusion
that the intellectualism of pariahs and ‘folk intellectuals’ (for

300

instance, rabbis) was as common a phenomenon as the intellec-
tualism of the top officials (for example, the Chinese mandarins)
or the clergy (in Hinduism or Judaism), and so on.

Weber classified religions, as well, according to their differ-
ent attitudes to the world. Acceptance of the world was charac-
teristic of Confucianism, for instance, and rejection and non-
acceptance of the world of Buddhism. ‘Indian religiosity ... is
the cradle of those religious ethics which have abnegated the
world’ in theory and in practice, he wrote.7> Some religions
accepted the world on condition of improving and correcting it:
such were Islam, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. The attitude
of religious ethics to the sphere of politics, and in general to
authority and coercion, depended on whether and how far the
world was accepted. A religion that rejected the world was
apolitical, as a rule, and excluded coercion. Buddhism was the
most consistent in this respect, although the ideas of non-vio-
lence were also characteristic of Christianity. Where the world
was completely accepted, religious views were readily coordinat-
ed with the realm of politics, Weber noted, and magical religions
did not in general come into conflict with politics.

World religions had a soteriological character, as a rule. The
problem of salvation was central in the religious ethic. Weber
analysed religious-ethical precepts in accordance with what road
of salvation they proposed. Two variants were primarily possible:
salvation through personal behaviour, as, for example, in Buddh-
ism, and salvation through an intercessor or saviour (Judaism, Is-
lam, Christianity). In the first case the methods of salvation were
either ritual cult actions and ceremonies or social actions (love
of near ones, philanthropy, care for near ones in Confucianism)
or, finally, self-perfection. In the second case (salvation through
a saviour) there were also several variations: (1) through insti-
tutionalisation (belonging to the Church as a condition of salva-
tion in Catholicism); (2) through faith (Judaism, Lutheranism);
(3) through the mercy of predestination (Islam, Calvinism).

Finally, Weber differentiated roads of salvation that no long-
er depended so much on fulfilment of commandments, and on
believers’ performance of ritual actions, as on their inner state.
Here he also discovered two different types: salvation through
positive ethical behaviour and through mystical contemplation.

301

In the first case the believer was aware of himself as an instru-
ment of the divine will;a necessary condition of the ethical char-
acter of his behaviour was ascesis. Here, in turn, two cases were
possible: either the goal was escape or flight from the world
(then asceticism was a means of liberation from all ties linking
a person with the world) or the goal was transformation of the
world (Calvinism) (in it ascesis served ends of inner-world,
economic, scientific, or other activity).

The second, contemplative road had as its goal attainment
of a state of mystical clarity or enlightenment, a union mystica,
peace in the divine (godhead). The means were the same ascesis;
as in the case of positive activity it also had a rational character.
The rational-ascetic behaviour was directed, however, to renun-
ciation of this world and absorption in the infinite.

As will be seen, the method of comparison and classification
that Weber constantly resorted to called for constant differen-
tiation and counterposing of the phenomena of religious con-
sciousness. The basis for his differentiation was once again ideal
types, which figured as the rational principle, the charismatic
principle, and finally the traditional one.

Behind these ideal types stood his own ‘ultimate values’:
(1) the ethic of brotherly love (‘good’); (2) ‘reason’, liberated
from values and made purely functional, i.e., formal rationality
(the former ‘truth’, secularised to a mechanism); (3) the sponta-
neous, elemental ecstatic principle, charisma, the basis of magi-
cal religions (irrational ‘force’, elemental ‘power’, ‘beauty’, on
whose side was the most irrational vital force, sexual love).

These three ‘principles’ were undoubtedly ideal types, and
they did not, as a rule, emerge in pure form in empirical reality.
There is no doubt, however, that they were all basic ‘values’,
which are both attracted and opposed to each other, in Weber’s
outlook, just like the ideal types constructed on their basis.

We realize again today that something can be sacred not only in
spite of its not being beautiful, but rather because and in so far as it
is not beautiful. You will find this documented in the fifty-third
chapter of the book of Isaiah and in the twenty-first Psalm. And,
since Nietzsche, we realize that something can be beautiful, not only
in spite of the aspect in which it is not good, but rather in that very
aspect. You will find this expressed earlier in the Fleurs du mal,

302

as Baudelaire named his volume of poems. It is commonplace to
observe that something may be true although it is not beautiful and
not holy and not good.7*

Polytheism, ‘the eternal struggle of the gods’, was the ideologi-
cal basis of Weber’s thinking, and it came out with especial
clarity in the sociology of religion, since he himself treated reli-
gion as the ultimate, not further reducible basis of all values.
It was impossible, according to him, to reconcile warring ‘va-
lues’; no scientific thinking, no philosophical meditation, could
find adequate grounds for preferring one group of values to an-
other.

I do not know how one might wish to decide ‘scientifically’ [he
wrote] the value of French and German culture; for here, too, dif-
ferent gods struggle with one another, now and for all times to come.

...Fate, and certainly not ‘science’, holds sway over these gods
and their struggles...

What man will take upon himself the attempt to ‘refute scientif-
ically’ the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount? For instance, the
sentence, ‘resist no evil’, or the image of turning the other cheek?
And yet it is clear, in mundane perspective, that this is an ethic of
undignified conduct; one has to choose between the religious digni-
ty which this ethic confers and the dignity of manly conduct which
preaches something quite different; ‘resist evil—lest you be co-
responsible for an overpowering evil’. According to our ultimate
standpoint, the one is the devil and the other God, and the individ-
ual has to decide which is God for him and which is the devil.”

This ‘polytheism’ at the level of ‘ultimate values’ can be
found in Weber more as a thinker close in his outlook to the
precepts and traditions of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche,
rather than as a follower of Kant and neo-Kantians. It was from
the former that he inherited his austere, courageous striving to
understand the truth, whatever it be; and it was from their tradi-
tion that his deep conviction arose that the truth was terrible
and cruel rather than consoling and comforting. He also inherit-
ed his kind of ‘regardlessness’ and ‘love of fate’, however cruel
the latter, from Nietzsche.

Weber’s sociology absorbed and took in all the contradictions

303

characteristic of modern capitalist society; and they blew up his
thinking from within. In order to overcome them he would have
had to alter the very premisses of his thinking and to overcome
the limits of the bourgeois-liberal world outlook, which he
could not do consciously and in principle, and did not want to
do. In 1885 he unambiguously declared that he was a member
of the bourgeois class and felt himself such, and had been
brought up in its views and ideals.’°

12. Max Weber in Historical Perspective

The ambivalence of Weber’s theoretical position coincided with
the ambivalence and inconsistency of the socio-political position
of German national liberalism. The capitalist class in Germany
had been compelled at the turn of the century to fight not only
against right-wing conservative forces, as it had earlier, but
also against forces much more to the left and more radical than
itself. The frame of mind of the German middle classes, ‘squeezed’
between the feudal, Junker estate, which had not yet left
the scene, and the proletariat, which had already come into the
scene, found expression in Weber’s political orientation.

His position also explains his ambivalent attitude to Marx.
On the one hand, he recognised Marx as an outstanding scholar
who had laid the foundations for the study of capitalism and
who had seen a powerful factor of progressive development in it
compared with the feudal type of economy. On the other hand,
however, Weber considered the conclusions Marx drew from the
analysis of capitalism to be utopian; he did not accept the road
of revolutionary transformation of capitalism proposed by
Marx; and he considered it impossible to build a new type of
society, socialist society.

Marx’s influence, as J have already remarked, showed in the
formation of one of the most important concepts of Weber’s
sociology, viz., the concept of rationality. But Weber waged a
polemic on this against Marxism, trying to show that formal
rationality as a principle of the modern capitalist economy was
not a result of capitalist production but arose from a con-
stellation of a whole number of various factors at a certain

304

historical moment. Formal rationality, according to him, was
the destiny of Europe (and now of all mankind) which it was
impossible to avoid. Weber considered utopian the Marxian
doctrine of the overcoming of capitalism and of the possibility
of building a new type of society—socialist society; he was not
inclined to idealise the capitalist world, but he saw no alterna-
tive to it. Rationality, exposed, already purely formal, and
lacking any value content, found in Weber its advocate; it was
on that basis that he continued to consider himself a middle-
class liberal, without illusions.

Weber rooted formal rationality not only in the economy but
also in science, law, and religious ethics, so as to prove that
the economic reorganisation of society could not bring the de-
sired result.

His methodological principles were also shaped by his polem-
ic against Marxism. His requirement of freedom from values,
for instance, was clearly directed against the principle of parti-
sanship in the social sciences. Weber sharply distinguished sci-
entific knowledge, as objective knowledge not depending on
the scientist’s ideological position, and political activity, even
of the same scientist himself, as two different spheres, each
of which should be independent of the other. But as I have
already shown, Weber himself could not realise this rigid division.

The construction of ideal types, in his sense, was to serve
as a means of research ‘independent of values’. He developed
the method of ideal typing in direct polemic against the histor-
ical school, and indirectly against Marx. The latter, in fact, had
striven in his works to understand society as a certain whole,
employing for that purpose the method of ascending from the
abstract to the concrete, by which the whole could be reproduced
in a concept. Weber, fighting all his life against those sociolo-
gists and historians who relied on whole structures, was undoubt-
edly also fighting Marx. His creation of the theory of social
action, which was meant to start from the individual and sub-
jective contemplation of his behaviour, was the result of a polem-
ic not only against the organicists (Le Bon and Durkheim),
but also against Marxism, to which he ascribed, without
grounds, an underestimation of the role of human consciousness
and individual motivation in the dynamics of the socio-histori-
cal process.

305
20-1147

Weber’s influence on non-Marxian sociology was immense,
but ambiguous. Parsons, who did much to popularise him in the
USA, exerted no little effort to synthesise Weber’s ideas with
those of Pareto and Durkheim in the context of a single theory
of social action; Weber’s theoretical categories were torn out of
their historical context for that purpose and converted into
concepts with a timeless content. At the same time Weber was
utilised as a banner of the antinaturalist orientation in sociolo-
gy. The crisis of structural functionalism in the 1960s strength-
ened interest in his antipositivist ideas and historicism, but at
the same time evoked sharp criticism of his methodological ob-
jectivism, and principle of ‘freedom from values’, from the left
(Alvin Gouldner and others). The attitude to Weber in West
German sociology, or rather its interpretation, became a water-
shed in the same period between positivistic, scientistic and left
Marxian orientations (in particular the Frankfort School);
this conflict, which covered a very broad range of matters, came
out especially clearly at the congress of West German sociolo-
gists in 1964 devoted to Weber’s centenary.””

In Marcuse’s paper, as in the earlier Dialektik der Aufklarung
(Dialectics of Enlightenment) of Horkheimer and Adorno
(1947), the ambiguity with which Weber related to the prin-
ciple of rationality was in essence removed, and his position on
this point interpreted as unambiguously negative. The situation
changed in the mid-70s; today West German sociology is passing
through a kind of ‘Weber renaissance’ oriented in a diametrically
opposite direction to the interest in him in the left radical sociol-
ogy of the 60s. This new trend found expression in the works
of Constans Seyfarth, Gert Schmidt, Wolfgang Schluchter, and
others.7° The writers of this trend,on the one hand, bring out
the ethical roots of the principle of rationality and, on the other
hand, propose a concrete sociological interpretation of it so as
to show what social strata have been the bearers of it during
the history of modern times. Jurgen Habermas continues to
defend the ideas of the Frankfort School—with certain reserva-
tions, incidentally—against these scholars.’ °

Notes

' Ben B. Seligman. Main Currents in Modern Economics. Economic
Thought since 1870 (The Free Press, Glencoe, III., 1962), p 24.

2 Max Weber. Uber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie.
Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr
(Paul Siebeck), Tiibingen, 1922), p 473.

3 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.
Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (Oxford University
Press, New York, 1947), p 113.

* See Max Weber. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. In: Grundriss der
Sozial6konomik, III. Abteilung (Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck),
Tubingen, 1925), p 10.

5 ‘In order to see the real causal connections, we construct unreal
ones’. Max Weber. Gesammelte politische Schriften (Verlag yon J. C. B.
Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tiibingen, 1951), p 287.

6 See Max Weber. Die ‘Objektivitat’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozi-
alpolitischer Erkentnis. Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Wissenschaftslehre,
p 190.

7 A. Walter. Max Weber ais Soziologe. Jahrbuch fiir Soziologie,
1926, 2:3.

5 Examples of Weber’s genetic ideal types were ‘the mediaeval town’,
‘Calvinism’, ‘Methodism’, the ‘culture of capitalism’, etc. They were all
formed, he explained, by stressing one aspect of the empirically given
facts. The differences between them and general family concepts was,
however, that family concepts (he suggested) were obtained by bringing
out one of the attributes of all the given phenomena, while a genetic ideal
type did not presuppose such a formal universality.

° See Hans Freyer. Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft. Logische
Grundlegung des Systems der Soziologie (Verlag von B.G. Teubner,
Leipzig, 1930), p 148.

10 See Max Weber. Uber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziolo-
gie. Op. cit., pp 403-404.

11 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
p 88.

12 Max Weber. Uber einige Kategorien... Op. cit., p 408.

'3 Thid., p 415.

14 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
p 88.

1S Ibid.

307
20*

16 See Talcott Parsons. The Social System (The Free Press, New
York ; Collier, Macmillan Limited, London; 1966), p 4.

17 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
p 101.

18 See Reinhard Bendix and Guenther Roth. Scholarship and Parti-
zanship. Essays on Max Weber (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley,
1971), pp 290-291.

19 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
p 109.

2° See Max Weber. Uber einige Kategorien... Op. cit., p 404.

21 Weber needed the concept of legitimately oriented rational behav-
iour in order to characterise objectively rational action; goal-oriented and
legitimately-oriented rational actions coincided when the means subjec-
tively chosen as most adequate to achieve a certain end were also the ob-
jectively most adequate ones.

22 Max Weber. Uber einige Kategorien... Op. cit., p 408.

23 Tbid., p 411.

24 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
p90.

25 See Max Weber. Uber einige Katogorien... Op. cit., p 410.

276 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
p 101.

27 Ibid,

2® See Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Eds.) From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology (OUP, New York, 1946), p 55. Cited from Lewis
A. Coser. Op. cit., p 218.

29 Ibid., p 219.

3° Wolfgang Mommsen, an authority on Weber, quite rightly con-
sidered this position an echo of the methodological principles of clas-
sical humanism. Weber’s sociology, he wrote, was not at all free of values;
even its radically individual starting point could be considered understand-
able only by starting from the European humanist tradition and its
respect for the individual. (See Wolfgang J. Mommsen. Max Weber und
die deutsche Politik. 1890-1920,J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tiibingen,
1959, p 69.)

31 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization
p 112.

32 On this point see the interesting polemic between Wolfgang Mom-
msen and Johannes Winckelmann in Mommsen’s Max Weber und die
deutsche Politik. 1890-1920, pp 414-419.

308

33° Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
p 11s.

34 Ibid., p 116.

35 Tbid., p 117.

36 Ibid.

37 Talcott Parsons noted, when analysing Weber’s conception of soci-
al action, that the category of ‘traditionalism has little theoretically to do
with the psychological concept of habit’. See his The Structure of Social
Action (The Free Press, Glencoe, III., 1949), p 647.

38 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
p 123.

39 Ibid., pp 184-185.

4° Karl Marx. Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58. In: Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 28 (Progress Publishers, Moscow,
1986), pp 222-223.

41 Weber never denied this influence, incidentally. Furthermore, he
classed Marx among the thinkers who had most strongly influenced the
socio-historical thought of the twentieth century. See Eduard Baumgar-
ten. Max Weber. Werk und Person (Verlag vonJ. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck),
Tubingen, 1964) pp 554-555.

42 Karl Marx. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), p 56.

43 Ibid., p 58.

44 Karl Lowith. Max Weber und Karl Marx. In: Gesammelte Abhand-
lungen. Zur Kritik der geschichtlichen Existenz (W. Kohlhammer Verlag,
Stuttgart, 1960), p 27.

45 Max Weber. Staatssoziologie (Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1956),
p 99,

46 Thid.

“7 Ibid.

*®Tbid., p 100.

49 Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
pp 333-334.

5° Ibid., p 337.

51 Max Weber. Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Soziologie und Sozialpoli-
tik (Verlag von J.C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tiibingen, 1924), p 413.

52 Max Weber. Staatssoziologie, p 101.

53 Patriarchal domination was the truest type of traditional domi-
nation, Weber wrote (/bid., p 103). It will readily be noted here that his
differentiating of the traditional and legitimate types of authority sprang

309

in essence from a counterposing of the two main types of social struc-
ture—Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft—made by Tonnies.

54 Weber repeatedly noted the instability and weakness of legitimacy
in the modern legal state; the legal type of domination, though suitable
for modern industrial society, seemed to him to need a certain ‘reinforc-
ing’. That is why he considered it useful to retain the hereditary monarch
as head of state, as has happened in some European countries.

55 Tbid., p 104.

56 Tbid., p 103.

57 Ibid., p 104.

5® Max Weber. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
p 361.

5° Thid., p 363.

69° Max Weber. Staatssoziologie, p 105.

6! And it was morals and customs, as Weber himself showed, that
gave law its legitimacy!

62 In order to avoid one-sidedness when examining Weber’s political
views, we must bear in mind that he never doubted the need for a parlia-
ment that could limit the power of a leader elected by plebiscite and
exercise a control function in relation both to him and to the adminis-
trative apparatus.

63 Arthur Mitzman. Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max
Weber (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970), pp 168-185.

64 In this connection see the appendix to a German edition of this
work (Max Weber. Die protestantische Ethik, Minchen, Hamburg, 1965).

®5 See Wolfgang J. Mommsen. Op. cit., p 35.

6 Weber published a series of papers on the sociology of world reli-
gions between 1916 and 1919 in Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik (1916, 41; 1916-17, 42; 1917-18, 44; 1918-19, 46).

®7 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Les aventures de la dialectique (Gal-
limard, Paris, 1955); Max Scheler. Die Wissensformen und die Gesell-
schaft (Francke, Bern, 1960).

68 Ernst Cassirer. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Vol. 2
(Cassirer, Berlin, 1925).

69 Max Weber. Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive
Sociology, VoL 1 (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1978), p 399.

7° Ibid.

7* Tbid., p 400.

72 See Wolfgang Bessner. Die Begriffsjurisprudenz, der Rechtspositi-
vismus und die Transzendentalphilosophie Immanuel Kants as Grundla-

310

gen der Soziologie und der politischen Ethik Max Webers. Dissertation
(Dissertationsdruck, Blasaditsch, Augsburg, 1968), p 78.

73 Max Weber. Religious Rejections of the World and Their Direc-
tion. In: From Max Weber, Op. cit., p 323.

74 Max Weber. Science as a Vocation. In: From Max Weber, Op. cit.,
pp 147-148.

75 [hid., p 148.

76 See Max Weber. Gesammelte politische Schriften (Verlag von J. C. B.
Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tiibingen, 1951), p 26.

77 See Eduard Baumgarten. Op. cit.; Ernst Cassirer. Op. cit.

78 See Constans Seyfarth. Gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung und die
Entwicklung der Intellektuellenschichten. Zur Weiterfiihrung eines
zentralen Themas Max Webers. In: Walter M. Sprondel und Constans
Seyfarth (Eds.). Max Weber und die Rationalisierung sozialen Handelns
(Ferdinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart, 1981), pp 189-223; Gert Schmidt.
Max Webers Beitrag zur empirischen Industrieforschung. In: K6lner
Zeitschrift fiir Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 1980, 32, 1: 76-92;
Wolfgang Schluchter. The Paradox of Rationalization. On the Relations
of ‘Ethics’ and ‘World’ in Max Weber. In: Zeitschrift fiir Soziologie,
1976, 5, 3: 256-284.

79 Jurgen Habermas. Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, VoL. I,
(Suhrkamp, Frankfort-on-Main, 1981), pp 240ff.

12

THE SOCIOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF
VILFREDO PARETO

Elena Osipova

1. Pareto and His Time

At the turn of the century a positivism distinguished by its
unoriginality and diversity dominated philosophy in Italy. Po-
sitivist sociological thought was also eclectic, combining ele-
ments of mechanicism, evolutionism, vulgar biologism, and
other trends. Such were the conceptions of Cesare Lombroso
(1836-1909), Enrico Ferri (1856-1929), and others. The ideas
of members of the Italian school of political sociology—Gae-
tano Mosca (1858-1941), Robert Michels (1 876-1936)—became
well known; the views of Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) were di-
rectly quite close to them.

The son of an aristocrat who had emigrated to France for
political reasons, Pareto was trained as an engineer and began
to work for the Rome Railway Company. Having early become
involved in political struggle, he began to write in the press with
a critique of the government’s economic policy, calling for free-
dom of trade and non-interference by the state in private busi-
ness.

The shaping of his scientific interests was influenced by the
leading Italian economist Matteo Pantaleoni, and Léon Walras,
the professor of political economy in Lausanne University. The
theory of economic equilibrium developed by Walras, transfer-
red by Pareto to the field of general theoretical notions of so-
ciety, subsequently became the basis on which he built his

312

sociological system. Pareto published a number of articles de-
voted to Walras’s theory, and after the latter’s retirement in
1893 succeeded to his chair.

Pareto’s first major publication Cours d'’économie politique
was based on his university lectures. Later he criticised the
policy of the government, was friends with many socialists, and
took up defence of Dreyfus.

Around 1900 a change took place in his moods and convic-
tions, owing to the collapse of his former liberal illusions. Con-
vinced that the day of liberalism had passed, that society had
entered a period of stagnation, and that coercion was necessary
in order to ensure stability of social life, he took up an openly
antidemocratic and antiliberal position. His new views found
reflection in Les systémes socialistes (1901), and his Manual
of Political Economy (1906), as well as in a number of articles.

Heart disease forced Pareto to give up professorial activity,
and in 1907 he gave up leadership of the chair, retaining only
the reading of lectures (until 1917). In 1912 he completed his
main work, entitled Trattato di sociologia generale (Treatise
on General Sociology), but because of the outbreak of war it
only appeared in 1916.

When the fascists came to power in Italy they showered Pa-
reto with honours. He was made a ‘Senator of the Kingdom of
Italy’, began to contribute to the journal Gerarchia, and so on.
He died within a year of the fascists’ coming to power, without
having ever defined his attitude to the new regime, which,
though it applied the methods of coercion recommended by
him, did not, however, resolve any of the socio-economic con-
tradictions.

Philosophically his sociology was a synthesis of positivism
and voluntarist irrationalism. The ideals of the French sociolo-
gist and theorist of anarchosyndicalism Georges Sorel (1847-
1922) had a big influence on him, especially Sorel’s theory of
violence and identification of revolutionary principles with re-
ligious myths; so, too, did the conceptions of Gaetano Mosca
about the universality of the division of society into two clas-
ses—the ruling class, monopolising power, and the subject
class, ruled by the former.

313

2. Methodology

Pareto intended his sociological system to put an end to the me-
taphysical and speculative discussion of society which had had
a dominant position in nineteenth-century socio-political
thought. The main idea inspiring him was to work out princip-
les of the structure of sociological knowledge that would en-
sure its reliability, effectiveness, and substantiation. While hold-
ing, on the whole, the conception of social science developed
by the founders of positivism, Comte, John Stuart Mill and
Spencer, Pareto justly criticised them for inconsistency in fol-
lowing the principle of empirical substantiation of knowledge.

He considered sociology to be a synthesis of various special
social disciplines (law, political economy, political history, his-
tory of religion), the aim of which was to study human society
as a whole.?

Pareto called the method, by which he aimed to disclose the
universal principles of the structure, functioning, and changes
of societies logico-experimental. In trying to make sociology an
exact science like physics, chemistry, and astronomy, he pro-
posed to employ only empirically substantiated descriptive state-
ments, strictly observing logical rules in the passage from obser-
vation to generalisation. Ethical and, in general, value elements
in a theory led, in his view, to distortion and falsification of the
facts, and should therefore be eliminated.

Any theory could be treated from three aspects (in his view):
(1) the objective—independent of the author and of the reci-
pient of the theory; (2) the subjective—in line with the author
and the recipient, when it became clear why the author had
created his theory, and a given individual apprehended it;
(3) the utilitarian—from the angle of its individual or social use-
fulness. In Pareto’s opinion usefulness did not depend on
the objectivity or subjectivity of a theory. In itself truth was
neutral and its social quality was only discovered through its
application to achieve definite aims. If the results proved use-
ful for society, the theory too was useful. If the results were
harmful, it meant that the theory did harm.” He considered,
moreover, that all social theories were equally false, limited, and
deformed in their content since no sociologist before him had
been guided by the logico-experimental method.

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Pareto’s treatment of the problems of causality, regularity,
social fact, and certain other more secondary methodological
matters bore the stamp of the influence of Machism. Like most
positivists he called for the concepts ‘absolute’ and ‘necessary’
to be discarded since they were alleged to include an a priori
content, the hallmark of metaphysics and theology. He suggest-
ed depicting the dependencies between social facts in the form
of quantitative formulas and indices. The sociologist, he claimed,
was interested in the intensity, strength, and weight of the
various social conditions and facts, not in the essential, neces-
sary character of the relation between them. The concept ‘es-
sence’, and likewise the concept ‘necessity’, seemed archaic sur-
vivals to him. ‘Essences ... are entities unknown to science,’
he wrote,? and interpreted a scientific law as a ‘uniformity’,
a repeatable event that had a probable character and did not
contain an element of necessity. As he understood it, a law
also lacked universal character and held only ‘within the limits
of the time and experience known to us’.* Closeness to the con-
ventionalist interpretation of law was expressed not only in
his affirmation of a law’s hypothetical and probability charac-
ter but also in his claim that it depended on some point of view
of the investigator’s, on the latter’s subjective choice of angle
for examining the connections of phenomena. Pareto did not
draw a sharp line between objective laws that expressed objec-
tive, necessary relations independent of man in nature and so-
ciety, and laws formulated by people with a definite aim and in
accordance with the researcher’s tasks, i.e. hypotheses.

The absence of clear boundaries between the objective and
subjective was also characteristic of his interpretation of the
concept ‘social fact’. He saw no difference between facts from,
the angle of their epistemological nature, material or ideal,
and from the standpoint of their truth or falsity.

That approach was fraught with deep contradictions and led
to misunderstanding of the specific nature of various ideological
phenomena (for example, religion). On the theoretical, metho-
dological plane it led either to a functionalist interpretation of
truth (all that exists is true), or to exclusion of problems of
truth from science (like the conformity of knowledge to rea-
lity) as having no relation to methodology.

Since the concept of causality expressed a relation that could

315

not be observed, Pareto also threw doubt on it. Criticising the
principle of monocausality, he concluded that the relation of
causality should be replaced by a relation of interdependence
or interaction. In denying the causal priority of any one phenom-
enon, he called for the causal connection to be replaced by a
functional one and the causal explanation, too, by a functional
one. Since every social phenomenon was a function of many
variables, social theory should pay attention to all the factors
operating in society and establish relations of constant depen-
dencies between them.

On those grounds he rejected the concept of linear evolution,
claiming that ‘evolution does not take place along a continuous
line’.

Pareto attached great importance to precision of scientific
terminology. But he did not give a rigorous, precise definition
of the main concepts he employed. And his intention to give
the Treatise a mathematical form remained declarative. He did
not go further than geometrical and algebraic illustrations, for-
mulas, and graphs.

By identifying the value aspect of a theory with a lie added
to its logico-experimental structure, he took up a stance of
freedom from values. But the divorce of theory from practice,
the reduction of truth to the correctness of formal logic, his
rejection of determinism as a principle of the study and expla-
nation of social phenomena deprived Pareto of the chance not
only to interpret the facts of social life of interest to him correct-
ly, but also to understand the origin and essence of the social
theories he was trying to get away from, and that he justly cri-
ticised in many respects.

3. Society as a System of the Interactions of Individuals

One of Pareto’s central ideas was to regard society as a system
in a state of gradual disturbance and restoration of equilibrium.
He took this concept from Walras’s economic theory, to which
Pareto gave a mechanical character, seeing a prototype of society
in a model of equilibrium all parts of which were strictly inter-
connected and mechanically influenced one another. Changes
in one part of the system were immediately transmitted to the

316

others, and brought the whole system into motion, until dyna-
mic equilibrium was again restored.

Pareto treated the economy as a subsystem of the social
system. In his view, the economic system consisted of indivi-
dual molecules—people—who were brought into motion by
needs and rational interests, and who encountered obstacles in
the way of their achieving the economically desirable. The so-
cial system was more complex. Human individuals were involved
in social action. It was sentiments governed by the indivi-
duals’ psychic stamp that were the mainspring that put the
whole system into action. It was much more difficult to under-
stand these feelings than any rational considerations.

Pareto divided social actions into logical and non-logical,
and in order to find criteria for differentiating them, he broke
an action down into its component elements, viz., the exter-
nally observable action and its rational basis (which was usually
given post factum), and the mental state of the acting person.
He regarded the last-named as a constant underlying the action
and determining its character. He considered the individual’s
mental state the objective basis of a social phenomenon, in con-
trast to its subjective basis, by which he understood the argu-
ments rationally advanced by the actor.®

The mistake of all preceding sociologists, he suggested,
was that they ignored the objective aspect of the matter and
only studied the theoretical conceptions arising from it, i.e.,
limited themselves to study of the subjective aspect of reality.
‘Objective’ sociological research, however, should be directed
to study of the mental orientations, and the ‘non-logical’ ac-
tions governed by them, that constituted the bulk of all human
actions in general. ‘Non-logical’ actions, according to Pareto, are
governed by a special logic of sentiments. In contrast to ‘logical’
ones they were the result of a person’s emotional state, and of
an irrational mental process, rather than of conscious arguments
and considerations.

‘Non-logical’ actions were characterised by the people who
performed them not knowing the true objective connections
between phenomena, and therefore employing inadequate
means to achieve ends, linking ends and means ‘non-logically’.
The connections of ends and means were illusory in that case
and existed only in the notions of the acting subject. Such, for

317

example, were offerings and sacrifices, and other religious rites
whose aim was to placate the divinity and so achieve the posed
goal. Means of that kind were not objectively linked with
the goal and therefore did not lead to attainment of it.

‘Logical’ actions were guided by reason rather than senti-
ments, and were regulated by norms and standards. They were
characteristic of activity in the realm of economics, science,
and (to some extent) of politics. In that case the means and
ends were linked together by an objective logic based on really
existing connections, and therefore led to attainment of the
ends. In other words, the means were adequate here to the ends.
Pareto pointed out the importance of this last element, since
all actions seemed, from the subjective point of view, to be
logical to those who performed them.

In trying to find objective grounds for treating ‘non-logical’
actions on another plane. Pareto proposed to take the ‘stand-
point of other persons who have a more extensive knowledge’
as the criterion of objectivity.’

Examination of the structure and elements of a social action,
and equally their classification according to the degree of con-
sciousness or dominant type of motivation, were, in themselves,
legitimate. But Pareto’s conception of a social action had an in-
dividualistic and irrationalist character, one-sidedly stressing
the emotional nature of human motives, for which he did not
find any other explanation than one that indicated their natu-
ral origin. The motivating reasons of the social actions of big
social groups and classes could not be explained from such
positions. For classes unite individuals who have very different
mental features; that, however, does not prevent these indivi-
duals from acting together at some moment of history.

The conception of social action developed by Pareto was
based on a certain conception of man. In stressing the non-lo-
gical, irrational nature of the individual, he claimed that a per-
son’s actions were never what they seemed to him himself. The
specifically human consisted in a capacity to employ reason to
disguise one’s ‘non-logical’ actions by means of seemingly logical
theories and arguments, and not in reason. The human being,
he wrote, in contrast to the animal, ‘wants to think, and he also
feels impelled to keep his instincts and sentiments hidden from
view’. And it was because all people were feeling creatures,

318

as well as reasonable ones, that the problem arose of the relation
of feelings and reason, sentiments and ideology. Pareto unhe-
sitatingly gave priority to sentiments, considering them the true
driving forces of human history. He reduced history patterns
to regularities of the irrational mental life of separate indivi-
duals, and called ideologies the ‘languages of sentiments’.

By considering emotions the basis of the social system’s
dynamism, Pareto thereby laid a biological foundation under
the social system, since he interpreted a human being’s psyche,
features, and peculiarities outside of and independent of the
socio-economic context. Although his approach to society as
a system was itself legitimate, the principle of mechanical
equilibrium, and the mechanical relationship of the elements
could not satisfactorily explain the functioning of society as
a whole.

The idea of functional dependence, divorced from the prin-
ciple of social determinism and meant to replace it, revealed
its theoretical unsoundness as an explanatory principle. Pareto
was compelled, in order to find the source of the system’s mo-

tion, to take up a stance of biologism and psychologism, i.e.,

to seek the source of social life in people’s psychological incli-
nations and dispositions and, moreover, ones that had no links
with production and economic activity, and were very arbi-
trarily selected.

4. Psychological Reductionism

Having made the emotional sphere of human activity the main
link in his sociological system, Pareto made the reservation that
only those sentiments were worthy of the sociologist’s attention
(and not all) that were manifested in actions of a certain kind
and that made it possible to classify them rigorously. They were
invariable, and constant, and were therefore the elements of
the social system which ‘determine the social equilibrium’.?
He gave them the unusual name of ‘residues’, difficult to inter-
pret, which signified in the language of chemistry the ‘sedimen-
tation’ or ‘residuals’, wanting thereby to stress their stability,
and capacity ‘to be left over’ after all rational considerations
had been abstracted from a social action.

319

According to Pareto ‘residues’, as the basis of sentiments,
emotions, passions, instincts, and psychological states and dis-
positions, were innate and natural, and were not subject to
the influence of conditions of an external character. They were
the inner, biological impulses that determined a person’s social
behaviour. He tried to explain all the numerous variants of
human behaviour from six main classes of ‘residues’, divided
into a host of subgroups. Having systematised historical actions
even further, he stressed the main role of the first two classes
of ‘residues’.

The first class he called the ‘instinct for combinations’,!°
which he claimed underlay all social changes. This was a per-
son’s inner psychological inclination to collect things, to rear-
range and combine them in different ways, sometimes for the
satisfaction of doing it, and sometimes because it was difficult
for him to refrain from collecting and combining.

The second class consisted of ‘group-persistences’ (or ‘per-
sistence of aggregates’)'! which expressed a tendency to main-
tain and preserve connections once formed. This conservative
feeling underlay the unpleasantness of everything new and hos-
tility to any changes and alterations.

Pareto included a person’s ‘need to express sentiment by ex-
ternal acts’, ‘sociality’, ‘integrity’, and, finally, the sex instinct
in the other classes of ‘residues’.

In the concluding parts of the Treatise he tried to apply
the theory of ‘residues’ to explain European history, depicting
it as a conflict of ‘tesidues’ of the first and second classes,
ie., the instinct of changes and conservatism, of innovation and
retrogradation. He treated ‘non-logical’ actions performed on
the basis of ‘residues’ as the main cell of social life determining
the course of the cyclical changes and reversions in history.

The unclarity of the concept ‘residue’, its complexity, and
the host of terms it included (for example, ‘sentiments’, ‘in-
stincts’, ‘manifestations of sentiments in actions’), and the dual
subject-object nature of the concept (psychological and social)
in his interpretation, led to its not passing into the vocabulary
of Western sociology.

The irrationalism of Pareto’s conception had deep episte-
mological and social roots, the real basis of which was the cri-
sis of the positivist, rationalistic model of man. At the same

320

time, his stressing of the decisive role of irrational psychic for-
ces was linked with a profound social pessimism, loss of faith
in human reason, discredited in the epoch of social crisis.
In place of the idea of the rationality of all existence, an idea
of its non-rationality and non-logicality was advanced; the idea
of rationality was succeeded by an irrationalism of a biological
colouring. Pareto’s sociological conception was clear evidence of
the impossibility of building a scientific theory of the perso-
nality and social action without relying on an adequate under-
standing of society.

Belief in the decisive role of ‘residues’ fed Pareto’s politi-
cal neo-Machiavellianism:

the art of government lies in finding ways to take advantage of such
sentiments, not in wasting one’s energies in futile efforts to destroy
them, the sole effect of the latter course very frequently being only
to strengthen them.'?

Having affirmed the underlying role of the emotional sphe-
tes of the human psyche, Pareto deduced his theories of ideolo-
gy, social stratification, and change of ruling élites from them.

5. The Conception of Ideology

Pareto’s interest in the theory of ideology, which was an integ-
ral part of his sociological system, was not fortuitous. Disap-
pointment with the policy of middle-class liberal parties, which
were incapable of effective action and were steeped in intrigues
and power struggles, avoked a particularly negative attitude to
the demagogic tricks and dodges cf the dominant socio-poli-
tical groupings, whose essence he saw in their striving to mask
their dirty political aims. At the same time the rise in the popu-
larity of Marxism in Italy convinced him of the strength and so-
cial significance of ideology, and stimulated a search for the of-
ten latent causes of its spread, and its influence on social life.
While retaining a stance of defence of the capitalist order,
Pareto endeavoured to explain the nature, special features, and
social functions of ideology in the modern world.

Pseudo-logical arguments, empty holding forth, false ar-

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guments, and false justifications and excuses were ‘manifesta-
tions of the human being’s hunger for thinking’.'? The need
for pseudo-logical theories justifying social behaviour, in which
the means proposed for attaining the ends were not linked with
them by objective logic, was expressed in the creation of theolo-
gical, ethical, and political doctrines that veiled and glossed over
the true essence of religion, morals, and politics. Social science
should therefore bring out the foundation of these doctrines,
i.e., the emotions governing them. For Pareto ideologies were
purely verbal covers, adroit demagogic plays and tricks that
were given a theoretical form so as to disguise the non-logical
character of an action. Ideologies were created so as to hide the
true impelling motives of actions whose roots lay in the irratio-
nal layers of the human mind. He called ideological conceptions,
beliefs, and theories ‘derivations’, so stressing their secondary
character, derived from emotions. And he developed a classi-
fication of them, dividing them into four classes.'*

The first class consisted of assertions presented as absolute
truths, axioms, or dogmas. The second class contained incom-
petent judgments justified by reference to authority. The third
class consisted of accords with generally accepted principles
and sentiments; the justification of this class often rested on
the sentiments of the acting person, the possessor of certain
‘residues’, but was depicted as an accord with the sentiments
of ‘all men, the majority of men, all good men, and so on’.'®
The fourth class of derivations was formed by purely verbal ar-
guments, ‘verbal proofs’, and expressions that had no objective
equivalent, like the sophisms known from formal logic. Deri-
vations of that kind, usually used by orators, were particularly
active because the sentiments needed were aroused in hearers
by means of adroitly employed turns of speech, so skilfully,
moreover, that the listeners did not even notice them. Such de-
rivations were highly valued in politics and court proceedings.
They also included simple juggling with words and employ-
ment of popular, well-chosen words and turns of phrase.’ ®

Pareto considered that false verbal phrases, derivations, ideo-
logies, and religions defied precise scientific analysis. But
he tried to find a way of explaining ideological phenomena.
It was wrong, he said, to consider these pseudo-logical constructs
as simply absurd or pathologies, or even to treat them as the

322

fruits of fantasy created by a priestly caste to stupefy the mas-
ses. When counterposing derivations (ideologies) to truth, he
stressed at the same time that their logical inconsistency by
no means reduced their social significance, or their value for
society as a whole and for separate actors. ‘The facts clearly
show that mythologies have no reality and at the same time
have the greatest social importance’.!”

One must note the accuracy of some of Pareto’s observa-
tions. He stressed, for instance, the active role of ideologies in
society and their mobilising force:

Generally speaking, a derivation is accepted not so much because it
convinces anybody as because it expresses clearly ideas that people
already have in a confused sort of way—this latter fact is usually the
main element in the situation. Once the derivation is accepted it
lends strength and aggressiveness to the corresponding sentiments,
which now have found a way to express themselves.’ ®

When bringing out the mechanism of the manipulation of mass
consciousness, he wrote:

The important thing is to have a derivation that is simple, and read-
ily grasped by everybody, even the most ignorant people, and then
to repeat it over and over and over again.’ ®

Stressing the role of unconscious elements of the human
mind, he formulated certain ideas of the psychology of the sub-
conscious, although he was not acquainted with the works of
Freud.

But, having separated the problem of non-logical action from
social practice, Pareto took up a stance of relativism. In his
view there were no differences of principle between the argu-
ments used by pagans and Christians, and by proponents of pro-
gress, humanism, social solidarity, democracy, etc. All these
theories were equally characterised by a predominance of sen-
timents over facts, and had no value from the scientific point
of view. He denied that ideologies differed essentially from one
another even when they arose at different levels of the develop-
ment of society, and contained different proportions of truth
and mythology. And, of course, he did not consider that the va-

323

rious forms of social consciousness reflected different aspects
of social being. There was no historical concretisation of the
problem when it was a matter of comparing the scientific value
of ideologies that existed simultaneously. According to him
ideologies only changed in form, replacing one system of ar-
gumentation with another, one verbal formulation with another,
more flexible and subtle one. In fact he confined the problem
of ideology within the narrow limits of the individual mind, se-
parating it from real history and the struggle of classes in which
the development of an ideology properly took place. _

A logical consequence of Pareto’s arguments was the thesis
that there were different individuals who can free themselves
of sentiments that deformed the image of reality.

Experience shows that a person can as it were divide himself in two
and, to an extent at least, lay aside his sentiments, preconceptions,
and beliefs when engaged in a scientific pursuit, resuming them
afterwards.?°

Such people were, in his view, geniuses. It was the fate of ‘com-
monplace writers of mediocre talents’ to surrender to senti-
ments and preconceptions. The great geniuses,

in virtue of their very qualities rise above the commonalty and stand
apart from the mass of people. They therefore reflect less reliably
the ideas, beliefs, and sentiments actually prevailing.” ?

That passage is evidence that Pareto was far from free of the
illusions of positivist rationalism in spite of the irrationalism
of his theory. According to his conceptions geniuses, leaders,
and outstanding personalities in general were bearers of reason,
while the masses were capable only of being guided by uncon-
scious sentiments and passions.

It was characteristic of him that he tried to delimit the tasks
of the logician and the sociologist.

When the logician has discovered the error in a reasoning, when he
can put his finger on the fallacy in it, his work is done. But that is
where the work of the sociologist begins, for he must find out why
the false argument is accepted, why the sophistry persuades...

324

It is the province of logic to tell why a reasoning is false. It is the
business of sociology to explain its wide acceptance.??

But his answer to this is by no means sociological:

An assertion is accepted and gains prestige through the sentiments
of various kinds which it excites in those who hear it, the sentiments
so acquiring status as ‘proof’. It convinces because it is stated in
a doctoral, sententious tone, with great assurance, and in a choice
literary language.? °

Derivations were derivative and dependent in the general
balance of social factors. Pareto was inclined to regard an ag-
gregate of ‘residues’ and interests, and the social heterogeneity
associated with them, as the social basis, and not socio-econo-
mic relations. He enthusiastically exposed and demystified va-
rious derivations. Legal theories, he said, were not a substantia-
tion of the actual application of laws but only the use of false
arguments in accordance with selfish ends. Moral derivations
served to cover up amoral ends, religious ones to conceal base
sentiments common, allegedly, to all ages and nations.

The influence of Karl Marx’s fight against idealist ideologi-
cal conceptions that deformed reality can be felt in Pareto’s
denunciatory fervour. But the positive solution to the problem
of social consciousness proper to Marxism was unacceptable
to him. It was impossible in general to explain why non-scien-
tific ideologies distorted reality, and to analyse their content
concretely and historically, i.e., to disclose their epistemological
and class roots, from the theoretical positions accepted by Pa-
teto. The concept of derivations revealed its insuperable narrow-
ness, since they did not contain more than the sentiments whose
expression they were. And the invariant ‘residues’ could not ex-
plain changes in ideologies. Nor could they reveal the latter’s
content.

The interpretation of ideology as a pseudo-logical substantia-
tion of an action already completed or being performed—the
basic cell of social life—also did not save the position. For Pa-
reto interpreted social action itself in an exclusively psycholo-
gical manner, as irrational by nature. If ideologies had an irra-
tional character, and the motives formulated by them lay out-

325

side reason, what factors could then be called really causal?
What sphere should they be looked for in? Marx and Engels had
sought them in the conditions of individuals’ social life, showing
that

the actions in each particular case were invariably initiated by ma-
terial causes and not by the accompanying phrases, that on the con-
trary the political and legal phrases, like the political actions and
their results, originated in material causes.? 4

Pareto, however, sought the source of ideological phenomena
in the mind of the separately isolated individual, treating it
unhistorically and abstractly. The real social forces that de-
termined the individual’s position in mass social movements,
and the actions of the masses in general, did not interest him.
The class structure of society, the interests and aspirations of
the various social forces that were free, by virtue of their objec-
tive social position, to base themselves more or less consistently
on science in their actions, had quite disappeared from his field
of view. His rejection of a class, historical approach to ideologi-
cal phenomena stamped his observations with a one-sided and
limited nature. Ultimately he himself proved to be on paths of
the ‘false consciousness’ he had seen it as his job to diagnose.
For along with the requirements of a logico-epistemological
character about which he spoke, a scientific theory, and the
methodology of the social sciences, necessarily included a socio-
logical analysis of social reality from the standpoint of certain
class interests. A formalistic one-sidedness of methodology,
and psychological reductionism determined the inadequacy of
Pareto’s conceptions of ideology.

6. The Idea of the Circulation of Elites

Social heterogeneity, which presupposed an initial psychological
inequality of individuals, was an essential element of a social
system, according to Pareto. The individuality of any social
group depended on the natural capabilities and talents of its
members, and that in turn determined the social position of the
group on a certain rung of the social ladder. To the class that

326

had ‘the highest indices in their branch of acitvity’ he gave the
name of élite.?*° The élite was a chosen part of the population;
the remainder followed the impulse given by it.2® The élite
was divided in turn into two parts: one was directly or indirect-
ly involved in the government of society (the ‘governing élite’
or ‘ruling class’); the other was not involved in government and
pursued an occupation in an artistic or scientific sphere (a
‘non-governing élite’).?7

The élite and the ‘non-élite’ correspondingly formed the
upper and lower strata of society. Members of the lower stra-
tum, the most gifted of them, ‘rose’, replenishing the ranks of
the governing élite, members of which, ‘decaying’, ‘sank’ into
the masses. A circulation of élites (or ‘class-circulation’) took
place, i.e., an interaction between the members of the heteroge-
neous society (which Pareto represented as a pyramid with the
élite at the apex).

An élite was characterised by a high degree of self-assurance
and prudence, and an ability to see the weak and most sensitive
places in others, and to exploit them for its own profit, while
the masses were usually confused and entangled in a network
of sentiments and prejudices. That justified

having a community divided into two parts, the one in which
knowledge prevails ruling and directing the other in which senti-
ments prevail, so that, in the end, action is vigorous and wisely
directed.?*

Pareto pointed out two main qualities of the governors, viz.,
an ability to persuade, by manipulating human sentiments, and
an ability to use force when necessary. These capacities were
mutually exclusive. Governments ruled either by using force or
by means of compromise and agreement. Consensus and coer-
cion, he said, had been means of government throughout his-
tory.?°

He developed the idea of government of the masses by mani-
pulation of their sentiments by means of ideas that subordina-
ted them to the interests of the governing classes. The work of
the government, he wrote, was so much the easier the better it
was able to make use of existing ‘residues’.*° Artful application
of that principle was the explanation of any political success,

327

according to him. But it was quickly discovered in the course
of political history that methods of persuasion alone were in-
adequate for the governing class’s maintenance of power. It must
know how to resort to force in good time. Pareto’s accusatory
critique was therefore directed against the ‘sentimental’ ideolo-
gies of liberalism and the humanism and compromises, etc.
preached by them. When a ruling élite was incapable of using
force, it decayed and was compelled to give way to another
élite that was more decisive and capable of resorting to force.
‘History is a graveyard of aristocracies,’ he wrote.*! The key
to explaining the rise and fall of governing classes, and of their
elevation and decay, lay in the mutually exclusive character of
the two types of government.

The mechanism by which ruling élites were renewed in peace
time was social mobility. The more ‘open’ a ruling class was, the
stronger its ‘health’ and the more capable it was of maintaining
its domination. The more closed it was, the stronger was the
tendency to decay.

The governing class is restored not only in numbers, but—and that
is the more important thing—in quality, by families rising from the
lower classes and bringing with them the vigour and the proportions
of residues necessary for keeping themselves in power. It is also re-
stored by the loss of its more degenerate members.??

With the exception of a completely closed élite, which had
become a caste, a ruling élite was usually in a state of contin-
uous, slow transformation. When the circulation of élites
went too slowly, elements built up in the highest strata that were
distinguished by powerlessness, demoralisation, and decay.
These strata lost the mental qualities that guaranteed their
élite position and were unable to cope with the need to employ
force. And among the lowest classes a number of individuals
arose who had the qualities needed to govern society. They
were capable of seizing power by force. But the new governing
class was transformed in turn into a feeble, decaying one, and
lost the capacity to rule. It could renew itself either by drawing
strength from the lower classes or by eliminating the physically
degenerate, no longer necessary members of the élite. If indi-
viduals accumulated in the lower classes, however, in spite of

328

these measures, who surpassed the upper classes in achieve-
ments, a period of revolution would set in, whose sense, in Pa-
reto’s view, was to renew the composition of the governing
élite, replenish the mental forces needed for governing, and
so restore social equilibrium.

Pareto was convinced that the cycles of elevation and de-
cline, of the rise and fall of an élite were necessary and inevitable.
Alternation, fluctuation, and succession of élites was a law of
the existence of human society. What was this law based on?

Pareto’s theory started from a conviction that the circula-
tion of élites was a consequence of an alternation in them of
‘residues’ of the first and second class. Each élite had a cor-
responding definite style of governing. An instinct of ‘combina-
tions’ governed the use of persuasion and deceit, and of cunning
means of bamboozling and misleading the masses.

A ‘persistence of aggregates’ instinct governed the opposing
qualities of the rulers. They were aggressive, authoritarian,
inclined to use force, and suspicious of manipulation, ma-
noeuvring, and compromises. While the first type of ruler lived
only in the now, the second aspired to the future. Rulers fab-
ricated ideals, lay and religious; their aims stretched far ahead.
The individual’s dedication to the service of society, the subor-
dination of individual interests to social ones, and courage and
constancy in the pursuit of these aims were the characteristic
features and spiritual values of this type of ruler.

Pareto called rulers among whom ‘combination residues’
predominated ‘foxes’, and those in which ‘residues’ of ‘persis-
tence of aggregates’ predominated ‘lions’. ‘Foxes’ were the
symbol of cunning, chicanery, and treachery; the ‘lions’ were
the symbol of strength, persistence, irreconcilability, and cour-
age.

‘Foxes’ and ‘lions’ corresponded to the types of ‘speculator’
and ‘rentier’ in business and financial activity. The ‘speculator’
was the prototype of businessmen, magnates, schemers, and
entrepreneurs who were striving for gain. He was immersed in
risky combinations, had no pangs of conscience, and strove for
success at any price. The ‘rentier’ was his complete opposite.
He was a timid depositor, living on a fixed income, afraid to
take steps that would damage his capital and cause himself in-
convenience. A preponderance of ‘rentiers’ in society was evi-

329

dence of its stabilisation, passing later into decay and decline.
A preponderance of ‘speculators’ predetermined development
in social and economic affairs.

The alternation of business and political cycles was linked
in Pareto’s conception of equilibrium with cycles of spiritual
production (intellectual, religious, artistic, etc.). A rhythmic
succession of periods of faith and scepticism took place in it,
on which Class I and Class II ‘residues’ ultimately rested. When
Class I ‘residues’ were strengthened in the minds of individuals,
and Class II ‘residues’ weakened, a change in the proportion of
‘residues’ took place in certain social groups. These groups
were dissatisfied with the reality around them, were critical of
the established order and the dominant values. In trying to cre-
ate their own scientifically based and logically sustained theories
and programmes they considered that a clearing of the road to
reason, and emancipation from prejudices. But when these pseu-
do-intellectual theories gained the upper hand in society a coun-
ter-tendency of spiritual life inevitably arose. Individuals in
whom feelings of ‘persistence of aggregates’ were strengthened
criticised the fake logicality and rationality of the new theories,
looking for mistakes and discrepancies in them. So anti-intellec-
tual, intuitivist, and mystical theories arose that gradually super-
seded positivism and rationalism.

The theory of the ‘circulation of élites’ was built by Pareto,
like the theory of social activity, on an investigation of the con-
genital biopsychic properties of individuals and not on analy-
sis of social relations and social institutions. The personal
features of rulers that they already possessed before they had
an élite position in society were primary in his conception of
power. When trying to pose the question of the relation of
biological and social differentiation, he considered that the ca-
pitalist economy provided scope, in conditions favourable for
its development, for free movement of its best members to the
summit of society, and for reproduction of its structure in
accordance with the biopsychic qualities of the individuals.
He did not suggest that possession of the personal qualities ne-
cessary for government was merely one of the conditions for
rise of the institution of domination, and not, moreover, the
main and decisive one. In reality capitalist competition was con-
trolled by the institution of capitalist private property. The

330

individuals who joined the struggle were already involved in
a certain system of social relations and had advantages due to
the position they occupied in society. The main factor in po-
litical success and selection of the ‘best’ from the contenders
for power was the strength of the political classes and groups
that stood behind them.

Political, ideological, and economic changes in society are
not the simple consequence of changes in the composition of
the ruling minority, as Pareto considered. The ‘circulation of
élites’ in fact expressed deep-seated social processes, primarily
of a socio-economic character. Political changes occurred when
the governing groups could not cope with the socio-economic
problems arising in the course of social practice, and were com-
pelled to resort to political manoeuvres.

His arguments about the functioning of élites were not based
on analysis of real mass social forces, and were not concretised
in accordance with the different historical periods, but stressed
attention to external, formal similarities of the various types of
government brought into the general scheme. While making
absolutes of the general features of the functioning of power
élites in antagonistic society, Pareto did not consider that differ-
ent historical periods presented the powers that be with differ-
ent demands under the influence of which the governing groups
formed on the basis of historically changing criteria were dif-
ferentiated and weakened. Why that happened could only be
explained from the standpoint of a dialectical materialist analy-
sis of the class division of society that determined the cor-
responding peculiarities in the features of state forms and
mechanisms.

Pareto drew an image of history repellent in its cynicism,
compiled of pictures of violence, swindles, crimes, palace
intrigues and fights and squabbles of the contenders for power.
In those conditions humanism was no more than a prejudice
or an ideology of self-humiliation; the future was in the hands
of politicians who had no conscience, who did not give a
thought to the social consequences of their actions so long as
they led to the desired end. Only that élite could ensure social
equilibrium which knew how to profit from power, was not
fastidious about the means, caring, in any case, only for its own
interests. ‘The end justifies the means’ Pareto said, repeating

331

Machiavelli’s aphorism (he esteemed Machiavelli much above
any modern writers).

Pareto’s socio-historical conception was profoundly pessi-
mistic. In his idea of it, history was doomed to eternally repeat-
ed cycles in the succession of which there was no notable pro-
gress; the ascending part of the curve was the ‘cause’ or the con-
dition for its descending part—and no more.

As Franz Borkenau has justly remarked Pareto’s ‘pessimism
need not be accounted for by a melancholy temperament’.>?
It is accountable by the collapse of the political ideals of a cer-
tain part of the capitalist class and its hatred of progress and
democracy. Pareto made historical pessimism, which grew into
a political ideology of conservatism idealising violence and force,
his programmatic orientation.

7. Pareto in the Historical Perspective

The Treatise came out during the imperialist First World War
and did not find a corresponding ‘sociological’ reader in Italy.
In France Durkheim’s school had a dominant position, defend-
ing a quite different theoretical stance. Later, the fact that the
fascists proclaimed Pareto their spiritual father, alienated liber-
ally minded circles from him.

Recognition came to him in America. In the early 1930s
L. J. Henderson, an eminent biochemist, held a seminar at
Harvard University to study Pareto’s conceptions, in which emi-
nent sociologists like Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, and
Clyde Kluckhohn, took part. The Treatise was published in
English in 1935; and as Coser has remarked, Pareto’s works were
‘largely read as a kind of bourgeois answer to Marx, or as a
conservative functional equivalent to him’.>*

Sociologists of more ‘leftist’ political views sharply criticis-
ed Pareto for political Machiavellianism, fascism, and an un-
modern mode of thinking.

Emory Bogardus and Floyd House [Coser has said] wrote lengthy
refutations in which they attempted to show that what was valid
in Pareto had long been said much better by Englishmen and Ameri-
cans such as Darwin, James and Sumner, and that the rest of his
work was no good at all.? 5

But the monographs on Pareto written by Henderson, and above
all by Parsons, did their job. Parsons, the head of the school of
structural functionalism, considered Pareto one of the outstand-
ing masters of sociology, declaring that ‘there is in it [the
Treatise] nothing essential on either the methodological or
the theoretical level which . . . must be discarded’.?°

Spokesmen of structural functionalism accepted and devel-
oped Pareto’s theory of social action, and also his conception
of society as a system in a state of equilibrium. The concept
of equilibrium introduced by him occupied a leading place in
structural-functional analysis as one of its main concepts and
starting points of research. Pareto’s systems approach to society
promoted development of the sociological tradition that consid-
ered problems of the stability of the social system the main
ones. Structural functionalists also considered a merit of Pare-
to’s his denial of a simple straight causal relation in favour of an
aggregate of variables in a state of functional interaction. Pa-
teto aimed the idea of interaction against the conception of
social determinism, and put it into a context of the theoretical
quests of Western sociological thought. Capitalist economists
valued his economic contribution just as highly, considering him
one of the founders of modern political economy.*”

Pareto himself considered his theory of ‘residues’ and ‘de-
rivations’ his greatest contribution to social thought. The irra-
tionalist conception of personality, integrated in the concep-
tion of ‘non-logical’ action, posed problems of the psychology
of the subconscious in general outline. That finds reflection in
contemporary Western social psychology, and in the treatment
of such phenomena as distorted consciousness, the mechanism
of rationalisation, the functioning of prejudices, and authori-
tarian personality.

Pareto’s conception of ideology is very popular among con-
temporary Western political scientists. The understanding of
ideologies as arbitrary theoretical constructs meant to mask and
rationalise prejudices and sentiments stresses the important
social role of systems of beliefs. The thesis that a human being
is guided by emotionally coloured beliefs, without going into
arguments about their truth or falsity, is widely employed in
the theory and methods of capitalist propaganda.

The theory of élites probably attracted most attention

333

to Pareto’s sociological system, and has served as the starting
point for numerous studies of the mechanisms of power from
various theoretical standpoints. This theory, taken in the con-
text of Pareto’s theoretical views, is grounds for considering
him the prophet of political regimes of a fascist type. Whether
he wanted it or not, Pareto’s works reflected the crisis trends
in the public affairs of Western Europe, whose development led
to fascism. His concentration of attention on problems of po-
litical struggle, the idea of the biological selection of the govern-
ing élite, his justification of the use of brute force, trampling
on legality, his critique of the rationalist approach to poli-
tics, and stressing of the significance of irrational, blind senti-
ments were all interwoven with ideas that underlay the writings
of official fascist theorists.

The Treatise was intended as a ‘gigantic rebuttal’ of Marx.
While denying Marx’s contribution to political economy, Pa-
reto attached great importance to him as a sociologist who stress-
ed the role of class struggle in history. But he was a determin-
ed opponent of scientific socialism and sharply criticised histori-
cal materialism, which he mistakenly considered ‘economic
materialism’. ‘Its error,’ in his view, ‘lies in representing that
interdependence as a relation of cause and effect’.°°

When one generalises the means of ‘refuting’ Marxism
employed by Pareto, one can say that he was endeavouring to
represent Marxist theory as a special case of his own ‘broader’
conception. The theory of class exploitation was to be dissolv-
ed in the ‘broader’ conception of the alternation of élites;
class differences were a partial case of ‘broader’—psychological—
differences, etc. Marxian partisanship was opposed to a requi-
rement to keep the logico-experimental orientation on a posi-
tion free from value judgments and neutral objectivity.

Pareto’s theoretical views were permeated with a spirit of
historical hopelessness. He clearly saw that the bourgeoisie
was in decline. He had no medicine, he wrote, to cure the sick-
ness it, or all society, if you liked, had contracted, He himself
clearly declared, on the contrary, that if any medicine did exist
(and he did not think so) it was quite unknown to him. He
thought himself in the position of a doctor who knew his pa-
tient was mortally ill with tuberculosis without knowing how to
save him.??

334

Notes

’ Vilfredo Pareto. The Mind and Society. Vol. I. Translated by And-
rew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingstone (Harcourt, Brance, New York
1935), p 3.

2 “A theory that is experimentally true may be now advantageous,
now detrimental, to society, and the same applies to a theory that is
experimentally false. Many many people deny that.’ Jbid., p 171.

3 Ibid., p 16.

* [bib., p 35.

5 Ibid., p 307.

® Jbid., p 76.

7 Tbid., p77.

8 The Mind and Society, Vol. Ill, p 888.

° Ibid., p 1126.

1° The Mind and Society, Vol. Il, p 516.

'! Tbid., p 517.

12 The Mind and Society, Vol. I, p 1281.

13 Tbid., p 889.

14 Dhid., p 899.

'S Tbid., p 926.

16 Ben B. Seligman. Main Currents in Modern Economics. Econom-
ic Thought since 1870 (The Free Press of Glencoe, Glencoe, III., 1962).

'7 The Mind and Society, Vol. Ill, p 1112.

18 Ibid., p 1202.

19 Tbid., p 1209.

2° The Mind and Society, Vol. I, p 72.

21 Ibid., p 324.

22 The Mind and Society, Vol. Ill, p 894.

23 Tbid., p 903.

24 See Frederick Engels’ review of Marx’s A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy. In: Karl Marx. A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977),
p 221.

25 Vilfredo Pareto. The Mind and Society, Vol. ll, p 1423.

26 The Mind and Society, Vol. I, p 169.

27 The Mind and Society, Vol. Ill, p 1423.

28 Thid., p 1241.

29 Vilfredo Pareto. Trattato di sociologia generale, Vol. Il, (Edizioni
di Communita, Milan, 1964), p 678.

335

3° Ibid., p 676.

31! The Mind and Society, Vol. Ill, p 1430.

3? Ibid., pp 1430-1431.

33 Franz Borkenau. Pareto (Chapman & Hall, London, 1936), p 161.

34 Lewis A. Coser. Masters of Sociological Thought (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, New York, 1977), p 423.

35 Ibid., p 424.

36 Talcott Parsons. The Structure of Social Action (The Free Press,
Glencoe, III., 1949), p 300.

37 Maurice Allais. Pareto, Vilfredo. Contributions to Economics.
In: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,Vol. 11 (The Mac-
millan Co., and The Free Press, New York, 1972), pp 399-408.

3® Vilfredo Pareto. The Mind and Society, Vol. I, p 500.

3° Cited from: Gottfried Eisermann. Bedeutende Soziologen (Fer-
dinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart, 1968), pp 159-160.

13
SOCIOLOGY IN PREREVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA

Igor Golosenko

Sociology arose in Russia as an independent science of the pat-
terns of development and functioning of social systems after
the Reform of 1861, when certain official bans on the study of
social problems that had previously existed were finally lift-
ed. It had even been forbidden to use the terms ‘society’ and
‘progress’ in official papers and documents in prereform Russia.
For all the monstrous contradictions of the emancipation of the
peasants from serfdom, considerable changes took place in the
economy and public affairs after the Reform and Russia made
seven-league strides along the capitalist road.

Dissolution of the feudal system and the genesis of industrial
capitalism became the ‘principal theoretical problem’ for Rus-
sian social studies at that time, as Lenin remarked.' Because
of the specific historical features of the country (a mixed econo-
my, a host of survivals of serfdom, the peasant commune, etc.),
this problem had a discussion character, about the necessity
and possibility, desirability and undesirability of capitalist evo-
lution. The liberal democratic intellectuals who reflected the
interests of peasant democracy (Neo-Slavophils, and Populists)
were against capitalism, though starting from absolutely differ-
ent theoretical, methodological, and ideological arguments.
Combining a radical, middle-class democratic, anti-feudal
programme with ideas of utopian socialism, this intelligentsia
simultaneously opposed survivals of serfdom and a capitalist
development of Russia.

Marxists, ‘legal Marxists’, and certain middle-class sociolo-

337
22-1147

gists stood for recognition of capitalism. There was an even
deeper differentiation associated with questions of the politi-
cal perspectives for capitalist evolution in Russia as capitalism
developed, the labour movement grew, and the socialist revo-
lution matured.

The contradictory character of the ideological stance of
middle-class sociologists determined the ambiguous character
of their theoretical and methodological answers and specific
studies. On the one hand, especially in the first decades after
the Reform, the antifeudal trend made it possible for Russian
social studies to carry out dedicated searches in the field of pure
theory. Some of the results of them made it possible to formu-
late progressive scientific ideas, for example, justification of the
union of sociology and history in the study of public opinion,
the significance of economics in the development of society,
the development of a comparative historical method on exten-
sive factual data, etc. It was not fortutious that the studies of
this kind made by Maxim Kovalevsky, Nicholas Kareev, and
others, were highly esteemed and employed by the founders of
Marxism. On the other hand, idealism, as the basis of their out-
look, defence of private property, a tendency to subjectivism
in theory and social practice, and hostility to Marxism determin-
ed the ultimate bankruptcy of Russian capitalist sociology.

A paradoxical situation built up in Russian social studies
in the early 1860. Some concrete social sciences (history, juris-
prudence, social statistics, etc.) had made some progress, but
their further development called for a global methodological
consideration of the material accumulated. At the same time,
the philosophy of history had already proved paralysed by inner
contradictions in the 40s and 50s (the dispute between the
Westernisers and the Slavophiles, and philosophical anthro-
pologism). In those conditions an interdisciplinary need arose
for a new generalising social science.

This idea was first put forward in 1845 by Valerian Maikov,
a talented social scientist, in an article ‘The Social Sciences in
Russia’. He gave the new science various names: the ‘philoso-
phy’, and ‘physiology’ of society, and ‘sociology’. But he defined
its subject-matter and function distinctly: it was to study ‘the
social order (prosperity)’, which consisted of a combination of
three types—‘economic’, ‘political’ (requiring constitutional

338

equality, rights, and a coincidence of personal and public inter-
ests) and ‘spiritual or moral’. All three types determined each
other, interacted, and developed. The special sciences (juris-
prudence, political economy, etc.) studied the types separate-
ly, but sociology studied the connections between them, taking
their results into account, and investigated the integrated com-
bination and harmony of the types, thanks to which it helped
the specific social sciences to overcome their inevitable theore-
tical one-sidedness. Sociology would help them become pract-
ical sciences achieving concrete results in study of the whole
of social reality.

Maikov illustrated his position by the following example:
if slave trade was justified by considerations of economic gain,
the social ‘order’ that grew up on that basis would not meet
the requirements of moral development and well-being, just as
the relative overcoming of material need would by no means
yield a harmonious order while peoples were alienated from po-
litical power. Disparaging of any aspect of order at the expense
of others would cause an inexorable decline of the whole. ‘The
living idea of the social sciences’, Maikov suggested, consisted
in creating a new philosophy of society that determined integ-
ral social prosperity.

Society is nothing else than a form of human being. So the idea of
the well-being of society cannot be separated, of course, from the
idea of a person’s prosperity or development. One may even say
that the development of society is one of the conditions for the de-
velopment of the individual.”

The future of ‘Russian sociological science’ presupposed
the tackling of several matters, according to Maikov, the most
important of which he considered to be ‘a rigorous, critical
review of the social sciences in the West’, overcoming of the
methodological ‘feudalism’ of the specific social sciences and
unification of their advances in a general, ideological synthesis
that would ensure their practical success and overcome the life-
less abstractness and subjectivism of the old philosophy of
history on lines of scientific realism. This new science would
arise of necessity and not by the whim and arbitrary will of
some theorist, and would be governed by the same laws as the

339
22"

particular humanitarian sciences. Maikov’s conclusions were
very shrewd. ‘At the close of the 60s,’ the historian Nicholas
Kareev later recalled, ‘positivism and sociology came into
general Russian mental use.’

Russian sociology passed through four stages in its develop-
ment, some of which succeeded one another, while others
coexisted and interacted.

The first stage, that of the rise of the ‘new science’ (the
end of the 60s to the end of the 80s) was characterised by
a research excitement and enthusiasm all of its own. The bound-
ary between everyday and scientific social knowledge was shift-
ing all the time. The aims of studies were formulated very ab-
stractly; the gathering and processing of material was methodo-
logically precipitate and hasty. The sociological works of that
time contained facts and generalisations of various kinds from
different fields of knowledge—jurisprudence, zoology, litera-
ture, physiology, social psychology, medicine, and so on. The
first person to work in this way in Russia was the sociologist
and publicist Nicholas Mikhailovsky, one of the founders of
subjective sociology.

Georg Simmel considered it was inevitable, in the initial
period of the forming of the new science, for a kind of ‘scien-
tific adventurism’ to appear. The fashionable label ‘sociology’
was stuck onto whatever one liked; tense, hostile relations
built up between devotees of the new science and spokesmen
of the other humanitarian sciences (history, jurisprudence, po-
litical economy, etc.). That was why sociology, a Cinderella
in the state universities of Russia, migrated into journalism
and into publicistic activity.

In its early stages Russian sociology was a prisoner of natu-
ralism, which aimed at deciding all social questions by relying
on biology. At the end of the 60s and on the early 70s the sub-
jective school, with its orientation to social psychology, was par-
ticularly popular. In that period Russian sociology was repre-
sented on the whole by competing positivist groups, namely,
naturalism (organicism), geographical determinism, psycholo-
gism (the subjective school), and sociopsychologism. Natural-
ism, it is true, quite quickly lost credit in Russian scientific
circles, although separate, not unsuccessful attempts to resur-
rect sociology ‘on the soil of the general laws of organic life’

340

continued throughout the whole period of the development of
non-Marxian sociology in Russia.

The predominant trend was positivism. In spite of its obvious
shortcomings, positivist sociology had favourable results. Re-
searchers’ attention was switched to society as a whole, instead
of the stereotypes of traditional history (the ‘great man’ and his
deeds), and to the interaction of the various aspects of this
social whole (economic, political, everyday, and cultural insti-
tutions). That view helped formulate new hypotheses and to
‘read’ already known facts in a new way. Positivist sociology
was therefore considered in this stage as the ‘natural science
of humanity’, which employed all the other sciences as a ‘trea-
sury”’ of facts and empirical generalisations for developing its
own abstract laws of social statics and dynamics.

This methodological orientation, however, did not help
put the new science’s own rapidly developing house into order
and promote its self-awareness. Contemporaries noted:

In its present form sociology is a pile of descriptive materials, partly
worked over, partly very little touched by scientific criticism, and
a pile of words, hypotheses, theories whose aim is to process this
material and deduce a system of reasoned generalisations from
it.?

The second stage in the development of Russian sociology
can be called that of ‘theoretical-methodological criticism’.
The critique was made in the context of the rising schools and
trends in order to consolidate them, but was also carried on
between them. In the 80s, in conditions of unprecedented state
terror (after the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881),
the total amount of sociological publications fell somewhat, but
never quite wholly disappeared.

In the 1890s to the 1910s there was a marked intellectual
revival and a wide spread of Marxism on the one hand and of
antipositivist theories on the other. A conception was clearly
traceable in the theoretical and methodological disputes of that
time that the attempts of the early positivists to create a new
science had been nothing but epistemological naiveté, and that
a sociological science was still ‘in the scaffolding stage’. Con-
cepts like ‘people’, ‘ideals’, ‘intelligentsia’, which had seemed so

341

clear and understandable in the first stage, were critically eva-
luated. The relations of sociology and other humanitarian sci-
ences were reconsidered; and some spokesmen of the latter
began to recognise the fruitfulness of the sociological point of
view. Naturalistic reductionism was sharply criticised.

The antipositivists, who spoke under a slogan of defence
of methodological principles, which came later to be called
‘historicism’ (Alexander Lappo-Danilevsky, Paul Novgorodtsev;
and others) were proponents of neo-Kantianism. Their fight
against positivists of all hues led to a clear differentiation being
made in the first decade of this century between the various
currents of Russian sociology.

Classic positivism gradually grew into neopositivism, orient-
ed to empirical studies, functionalism, and scientism. The
struggle between the many competing theories in capitalist
sociology and their joint confrontation with Marxist sociology
intensified. The names of Comte, Spencer, Quételet, Simmel,
Durkheim, and others might escape attention, depending on
the theoretical sympathies and antipathies of the Russian so-
ciologists concerned, but not Marx’s,

The polemic between sociologists of the various trends, even
when it was one-sided at times and unfair, was useful in the end
because it helped them clarify the ideological shifts in society
and to understand their own mistakes and the opposite point
of view. The theoretical-methodological positions and evolution
of the ideas of a number of the leading sociologists took shape
in the fire of criticism.

The third stage in the development of Russian sociology
can be called that of ‘methodological consolidation’. The theo-
retical and empirical standard of knowledge as a whole rose
then. During the first decade of this century the number of Rus-
sian sociological publications almost trebled compared with
the last decade of the nineteenth century.

A stratification according to ontology (problems of social
reality and the laws of its functioning and development) and
social epistemology (the possibility of knowing social reality
by some method or other) can be traced in each of the trends
of Russian sociology. Two different treatments of social reali-
ty—realism and nominalism, and a host of eclectic transitions
between them—can be found in the history of sociology from

342

Comte to our day. According to the realist interpretation, soci-
ety is a real organic entity, and primary as regards the indivi-
dual. The components of this entity are the products of the
action of historical forces that have deep, natural roots in the
past. The individual never existed outside these forces and the
unity of their manifestation. Only through society or, as sociol-
ogists say, ‘through socialisation’, does the individual become a
personality. In Russia sociological realism had supporters both
among positivists and among certain antipositivists.

Opposed to realism was the nominalist approach, which treat-
ed social reality as the initial, self-sufficing interaction of in-
dividuals, and society as an aggregate of these interactions and
personalities. A cult of militant individualism, psychological-
ness, and subjectivism, was closely linked with this approach.
Certain positivists, many antipositivists and neopositivists were
proponents of nominalism, although they employed different
arguments, of course.

In social epistemology, on the one hand, there was metho-
dological objectivism (positivist and neopositivist), usually
oriented to the methods of the natural sciences and quantita-
tive procedures. Some antipositivists, who took a stand on
objectivism, tried to give the theoretical social sciences the form
of the latest social philosophy, that removed the old dilemma
of the philosophy of history and sociology about the knowabi-
lity of social reality. On the other hand methodological subjec-
tivism had supporters not only among antipositivists but also
among some of the positivists (psychological reductionism).

An idea of the trends in Russian sociology can be got from
Table I.

(1) It is quite obvious from it that Russian sociology was in
the mainstream of world sociological thought, and that Russian
scholars were constantly noting this fact. It is also clear that
positivism was the main trend in sociology in Russia. Quanti-
tatively positivists provided the bulk of Russian sociological li-
terature, and many of them acquired world prominence (P. Li-
lienfeld, M. Kovalevsky, N. Kareev, E. de Roberty, Pitirim So-
rokin).

(2) A specific feature of Russian sociology was the appear-
ance in it, earlier than in the sociology of any other country,
of a positivist monadology and methodological subjectivism (the

343

Table I

Positivism Antipositivism Neopositivism

1, Positivist holism (organicism, geo- 3. Antipositivist holism (the social phil- 5. Recognition of the need for a syn-
graphical and demographicdeterminism, osophy of Simon Frank, Leo Karsavin; thesis of holism and monadology,
‘sociological series'— Eugene de Roberty Neo-Hegelianism, Neo-Slavophilism but coming down objectively onto lines
and others. Natural laws of social mat- (Nicholas Danilevsky, Constantine of monadology (Pitirim Sorokin, Takh-
ter (evolutionism). Leontiev). Universal law of an organis- _ tarev). Functional laws.

2. Positivist monadology (the subjec- _— mic kind (philosophical interpretation).

tive school, psychologists: Nicholas 4. Antipositivist monadology (Neo-Kan-

Korkunov, and others). Natural laws tianism). ‘Natural law’. Necessity and

with moral sanctions. duty.

Social ontology

6. Positivist methodological objectivism 8. Antipositivist methodological objec- 10. The methodological objectivism of
(all versions of naturalistic reductionism tivism (Neo-Hegelianism, Neo-Slavo- neopositivism (scientism, the critique of
(pluralism—Kovalevsk y, monism—de philism). introspection).

Roberty). 9. Antipositivist methodological sub-

7. Positivist methodological subjectiv- _jectivism (Neo-Kantianism)

‘4 ism (the subjective school and all other

forms of psychological reductionism

| in positivism: early Frank, L. Obolensky,

3 and others).

——————oOEOEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeeEeEEeEe——

subjective school). Another feature was the attempt of neopos-
itivism (primarily behaviourism) to synthesise sociological ho-
lism and monadology, at a time when most supporters of this
trend in the West took their stand on positions of monadology
and elementarism.

(3) Russian sociologists attached principled significance to
their theoretical disagreements (positivism, antipositivism, and
neopositivism). As regards social ontology they all recognised
the existence of laws of social statics and dynamics, although
they varied widely in their interpretation of the essence of these
laws and the possibility of combining them with a moral evalua-
tion. But it was characteristic of all the trends that they had, to
some extent, a common methodological basis. This was charac-
teristic in particular of the subjective school and neo-Kantian-
ism. Both trends, which constantly polemicised against each
other, relied on psychological reductionism when tackling most
problems, although they also resorted to various arguments and
had different philosophical traditions.

(4) No trend in Russian sociology ever existed in absolutely
pure form. The logic of the evolution of ideas led to certain so-
ciologists passing from one school to another. Frank, for instan-
ce, who belonged to the subjective school, began to profess an-
tipositivist methodological objectivism. Certain of the Russian
sociologists understood the need for a broad synthesis of the
various trends in sociology. Kareev, for instance, tried to synthe-
sise all the tenets of the subjective school, and V. Khvostov of
neo-Kantianism. Kovalevsky and de Roberty continued the
cross-integration of positivist trends in the early twentieth cen-
tury, and Frank of antipositivist ones in the 1920s. Finally,
Sorokin wanted, at the end of the 30s, to create an ‘integralist’
sociology by synthesising the positivist and antipositivist schools.
Its significance can only be correctly understood in the context
of the whole of Russian sociology.

What were the leading themes of the Russian sociological
literature of the time? Most of it was devoted to constituting
sociology as an independent science, to discussion of research
fields and methods, and of the main theoretical and methodologi-
cal principles (monism-pluralism, realism-nominalism, evolu-
tionism-functionalism, and so on), and concepts. Tendencies
to demarcate philosophy and sociology were intensified. The

345
23-1147

new science developed its empirical foundations and quantita-
tive methods, and developed working techniques.

Another important theme of Russian sociological literature
was discussion of problems of social dynamics (evolution, pro-
gress), the phases of evolution and their sequence, the ‘laws and
formulas’ of progress, and historical comparative methods.
Evolutionist sociologists suggested, though with certain reser-
vations, that there was a universal, linear process of social evo-
lution along which nations passed through one and the same sta-
ges of development. Social and natural conditions always ge-
nerated a more or less identical culture, customs, and insti-
tutions, so that the diversity of socio-cultural phenomena could
be reduced, with strict observance of positive methods of re-
search, to a single genetic series. Hence the widespread inter-
pretation of general sociology as ‘genetic’.

On the other hand, however, such an interpretation of so-
cial evolution encountered unresolvable inner contradictions
from the very start. Should one, continuing the line of the old
social philosophy, speak about the global evolution of a single
society (‘organicists’, proponents of ‘geographical determinism’,
‘social Darwinists’, and so on) or was it necessary to concen-
trate on studying the relatively completed cycles of development
of separate spheres and areas of society, viz., the economy,
political institutions, culture (Kovalevsky and others)? How was
the principle of total change to be combined with the idea of
the unity of the social system, all elements of which were striv-
ing to maintain functional equilibrium (‘organicists’, de Reber-
ty, and others)? The sociologists of the second half of the ni-
neteenth century persisted in trying to answer these questions.

Positivists deduced the many ‘laws of evolution’, ‘stages
of development’ of society mechanically from certain general
philosophical principles rather than from empirical data. From
that a tendency arose to fit the facts to oversimplified schemes.
And positivist sociologists interpreted the principle of devel-
opment itself as very simple orthogenesis, not seeing anything
in preceding history except ‘preparation’ of capitalist civilisa-
tion. They tried, of course, either not to notice the social anta-
gonisms of the latter or to subject it to utopian criticism (the
subjective school and the neo-Slavophiles).

It is an interesting fact that it was in Russia that the first

346

SS

critical article appeared against the linear, evolutionary concep-
tion of history. Its author, Nicholas Danilevsky, set out his
anti-evolutionist idea in Russia and Europe in 1869. His socio-
logical doctrine was based on an idea of isolated, local ‘cultu-
ral-historical types’ (civilisations). He denied interaction and
mutual influence of peoples during history, made an absolute
of the uniqueness and inimitability of the inner wholeness of
cultures, and involuntarily went to the other extreme of ignor-
ing the main lines of world development.

A gradual drawing on the data of ethnology, and comparative
study of past cultures broke up the old evolutionary schemes.
At one time or other anti-evolutionism became the vogue (Ro-
bert Wipper, Sergius Bulgakov, and many others), to the point
of recognition of the significance of ‘sociological laws’ as func-
tional only (Pitirim Sorokin).

The third most important theme of Russian sociology was
social structure (order) and social behaviour. The underlying
social phenomenon and initial entity for analysis was interpre-
ted, following Simmel, as ‘social interaction’ (Kareev, Sorokin,
and others). Constant, mass, reproductive interaction gave ‘so-
cial relations’ and ‘social life’, while personal involvement in
it gave ‘social connections’. But the sociologists of the various
trends treated ‘interaction’ differently. For Kareev it was a
kind of foundation on which the other parts of the social

| structure were built up, i.e., groups, organisations, and institu-
tions. B. Kistyakovsky, in accordance with the neo-Kantian
orientation, was interested in the psychological (motivational,
normative) content of interaction. Sorokin studied the inner
structure, and interaction, on the plane of social behaviour.

The ‘social group’ was a main theme of Russian sociology.
Sorokin (one of the founders of theories of social mobility and
social stratification) concerned himself with problems of the
classification of social groups and the theoretical, methodolo-
gical principles of classification. Problems of the contrasting
of the organised ‘social group’ and particular congeries of peop-
le (groups, the public, the collectivities) aroused very great in-
terest. Problems of the intelligentsia and social classes were in-
sistently posed, and several conceptions of the nature of social
classes and the intelligentsia existed among Russian sociologists.
According to the ‘socio-ethical’ conception, the intelligentsia

347
238

was a heterogeneous social group, not part of the estates of the
realm, and above class, which had special spiritual, mental pro-
perties. According to another conception the intelligentsia was
an independent ‘social class’. Spokesmen of a third xonception
regarded the intelligentsia from religious and cultural positions.

The general posing of problems of the social psychology of
various groups was developed and concretised through study of
a number of specific problems, for example, of military psychol-
ogy, the socio-psychological nature of hooliganism, and so on.

The concepts of ‘status’, ‘subscriber’, and ‘position’ were
employed to define the place of the individual in a group.
The regulating actions of the individual were defined by the
concept ‘norm’. Both positivists and neo-Kantians recognised
the importance of normative examination of group life. Other
components of social structure that attracted attention were
the institution of power and authority (law, bureaucracy, the
nature of the state, etc.).

Special attention was paid to two polar states: ‘social order’—
mutual aid, co-operation, solidarity; the integration of social
groups—and conflicts and struggle between them. A specific
concretisation of these states was the problem of peace and war.
One of the best-known conceptions of lasting peace, which is
now called ‘world government’, took shape early in Russian
sociology.

Development and application of the theoretical content of
the concept ‘social system’ attracted the attention of a number
of sociologists. The first of them to employ the term ‘social
system’ to describe the general state of society was the econo-
mist and philosopher Alexander Bogdanov, who regarded so-
ciety as a union of many elements. The external elements
were the physical and natural environment (climate, fauna,
flora), and interaction with other societies; the inner elements
were primarily groups with functions of government and man-
agement, and their ideology.

Sorokin defined ‘social system’ in the early 1920s as a ‘sys-
tem of systems’. In accordance with that he distinguished seve-
tal types of social system: the interpersonal interaction of a
group; the articulation of groups (cumulative groups), and so-
ciety as a whole. According to him sociology was primarily
interested in social facts. The main thing for real unity of a

348

social system, he suggested, was the existence of causal-func-
tional relations between the three inner components of interac-
tion: viz., the agents (individuals), the acts of interaction,
and symbols (conductors), and also the existence of similar
connections between the interactions themselves in broader
contexts. There was no structural unity without a close, per-
manent functional connection of the components, but only
spatial or mechanical co-existence. At the end of the 30s he re-
garded the concept ‘social system’ differently, in the spirit
of ‘socio-cultural integration’, and stressed the primacy of spir-
itual integration rather than functional connections, of sym-
bols, ‘laws-norms’, etc., rather than individuals and acts. Later
he wrote that this revaluation was a further development of the
tradition of Max Weber and Wilhelm Dilthey, on the one hand,
and of the Russian neo-Kantians on the other.

Yet another important theme of Russian sociology was per-
sonality. One must note, however, that there was still no great
development of the theory of personality in sociology in those
years. The theories of Nicholas Mikhailovsky and Peter Lavrov
on personality as independent individuality were not, strictly
speaking, sociological. Mikhailovsky’s conception was a human-
ist one of the human being, i.e., he considered personality to
be the yardstick of progress. His ideal was all-round develop-
ment, ‘diversity’ of the personality. On the background of bio-
logical reductionism, which reduced personality to a ‘cell’,
‘function’, ‘corpuscule’ of the social organism, above all in con-
ditions of autocratic despotism, this idea was undoubtedly
progressive.

As for the theoretical and ideological importance of Lav-
rov’s theory of the ‘critically thinking individual’, it was the
first developed form of the intelligentsia’s self-awareness in
Russia. Lavrov considered the essence of history to be the de-
velopment of culture (traditional social forms inclined to stag-
nate) into civilisation (conscious historical movement, realised
by ‘critical thought’). Since thought, according to him, was
real only in the individual person, the main driving force of his-
tory were ‘critically thinking individuals’, i.e., the progressive,
advanced intelligentsia.

The subjective sociologist Kareev employed the term ‘social
role’ when speaking of personality, but extremely metaphori-

349

cally; he gradually came to a conviction that the only fruit-
ful approach was treatment of personality simultaneously as
the product of social relations and of their reformer.

While Sorokin did not resort to the term ‘role’, he gave a
similar theoretical interpretation of the part of the individual
(the personality as a subscribing member of different groups).

Another important problem for Russian sociology, in addi-
tion to society and personality, was that of culture. Social
philosophy concerned itself in the main with this. Danilevsky’s
‘culturology’ evoked long, bitter disputes. Even when people
did not agree with it, they were considerably influenced by it
(for example, Sorokin). As for the narrower, sociological study
of culture, it was regarded as the result and determinant of social
actions and interactions (Sergius Yuzhakov, Eugene de Ro-
berty, and other sociologists). De Roberty, Mikhail Tugan-Ba-
ranovsky, and Peter Struve suggested that the different elements
of culture interacted in various succession, non-synchronously,
with a lag (the Russian version of the theory of ‘cultural lag’).
The integration of the different elements and systems of culture
interested Sorokin (in the later period of his work).

One must specially note that Russian sociologists responded
in a lively way to the works of Western colleagues. They devo-
ted much effective effort to translating, reviewing, and survey-
ing the foreign sociological literature. Practically all the well-
known sociologists of the West (Lester Ward, Giddings, Gabriel
Tarde, Gumplowicz, Herbert Spencer, Ferdinand Ténnies,
Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim) were translated
into Russian and commented on. Broad personal contacts were
maintained. Kovalevsky, for example, was well acquainted with
almost all the leading sociologists at the turn of the century.
Russian sociologists were not simply pupils and popularisers
of foreign scholars, but in several cases critically developed and
applied many of their ideas to other conditions and tasks,
and carried them further. An example was Danilevsky’s already
mentioned cultural typology, later accepted by Oswald Spengler
and Arnold Toynbee. Mikhailovsky laid the foundations of psy-
chologism (description of the phenomenon of imitation) before
Tarde. The work of Bekhterev and Pavlov had great influence
on laying of the scientific foundations of behaviourism. Sorokin
created the theory of social stratification and mobility.

350

The picture of sociological activity in Russia would not be
full if we did not deal with empirical (above all, statistical)
social studies, the more so that they arose much earlier than
sociology itself, as, incidentally, in all European countries.
There were differences, however. Along with national govern-
ment statistics there were local government (Zemstvo) statistics,
an institution that had no like in other countries. (The Zemstvo
was a local government body set up in a number of provinces
of European Russia by the land reform of 1864). Zemstvo sta-
tistics were mainly compiled to study the state of agriculture
and the course of its socio-economic development. The local
government intelligentsia acquired great influence in the Zemst-
vos at the end of the nineteenth century. Zemstvo statistics
accumulated immense data on the state and development of
peasant farming in Russia.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the activity of the
Zemstvo statistical services was followed up and broadened by
many journals, scientific societies, and private persons (teachers,
doctors, economists, and engineers), who started to carry out
empirical social studies at their own risk and on their own
responsibility. ‘The questionnaire is more and more winning the
sympathy both of individuals and of whole organisations in
order to clarify and study social life, the journal Russkaya
mysl wrote.*

The matters studied by sociology and the statistical services
in the main concerned the life and position of the poor, drun-
kenness, suicides, and so on. These were ‘sore subjects’ in Cza-
rist Russia. The empirical studies were sometimes not entirely
irreproachable from the scientific standpoint either on the orga-
nisational plane or the methodological. In some cases there
was little sampling, the quantitative criteria of measurement
were debatable, the questions were often ambiguous, the com-
parability of the data obtained was poor, and so on. But there
were also interesting studies distinguished by quite representa-
tive data that still have value today for both the historian and
the sociologist.

As the substance of these studies was grasped, methodologi-
cal works appeared more and more frequently that tried to draw
conclusions from empirical scientific practice and to eliminate
its shortcomings. A conviction grew in the first decades of this

35)

century of a need for joint work by theoretical and empirical
sociologists. Institutionalisation of sociology began at the be-
ginning of the century. The ideological leitmotif of its evolu-
tion in Czarist Russia was recognition of the need for capital-
ist reforms, which inevitably brought Russian scholars into con-
flict with the bureaucratic machinery. The authorities, in turn,
were suspicious of any display of free thinking and scientific
search. That deformed the institutionalising of sociology. The
business of founding specialised professional institutions, chairs,
journals, and courses dragged on for decades. The way into the
universities for sociology was cleared with difficulty. Russian
sociologists therefore, in the majority, had no special sociolo-
gical training. Historians, lawyers, economists, graduates of mi-
litary schools and of science faculties, journalists, clergymen,
civil servants, and so on, engaged in sociology.

The interest of the broad public in the theoretical and em-
pirical aspects of this science rose sharply from the middle of
the 1890s, as was recorded in polls of readers’ tastes at the be-
ginning of the century. Separate works appeared and special
‘programme-guides’ to the diversity of the sociological litera-
ture appeared, and the first bibliographies, unique for those
years, were compiled.’ Kareev’s Introduction to the Study
of Sociology (1897), for instance, was intended both as a text-
book for the thematic teaching of sociology and as an original,
historical, critical study of the main trends in the sociology
of those years. The ‘Russian tradition’ in the historiography
of sociology, which in time included the works of major socio-
logists (Kovalevsky, Sorokin, and others), began with it. But
since the teaching of sociology was still banned in Russian
educational institutions, Kovalevsky, de Roberty, Novicow,
and other Russian sociologists took part in the work of sociolo-
gical seminars in the universities of France, the USA, Germany,
and Belgium.

In 1901 Kovalevsky and de Roberty founded the ‘Russian
School of Social Sciences’ in Paris. The press of the day justly
appraised it as a ‘first model of a sociological faculty’ that had
no analogy in world science and the system of higher educa-
tion.

The main aim of this School’s teaching was sociology and
(which was specially important) its application to ‘the econo-

352

mic, political, and spiritual problems of Russia’. Kovalevsky
considered that sociological theory had not yet been estab-
lished, but that the sociological approach had already made pro-
gress in concrete social sciences (ethnography, jurisprudence,
history of religion, etc.). Sociology therefore had to be taught
‘from the standpoint of its method and scientific tasks’, and
should not expound any particular doctrine dogmatically.
The main systematic courses were devoted to the philosophi-
cal foundations of the natural and social sciences, the history
of sociology, and its interdisciplinary relations. A large number
of special courses were read on every possible kind of sociolo-
gical problem (problems of the family, authority and power,
the state, religion, and so on). The practical exercises were
devoted to the following themes: (1) Russia’s industrial and
technical progress; (2)the Zemstvo and the history of self-
government; (3) the press, political trends and groups; (4) the
working class and peasantry. The writing and defence of disserta-
tions on sociology after three years of study were contemplated.

The School also set itself other tasks, viz., to acquaint fore-
ign scholars with the most important problems of Russian so-
ciety and its social science, and to determine the degree of ap-
plicability of Western scientific conclusions to Russian reality.
The foreign collaborators with the School included Alfred
Fouillée, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Tarde, de Greef, and many others.
‘The Russian School’ and its founders were proponents of the
capitalist democratic renewal of Russia.

In spite of the School’s being closed on the demand of the
Czarist government, it played an important role in establish-
ing Russian sociology. Its many lectures and courses became the
themes of further scientific studies by the lecturers and stu-
dents. It helped arouse interest in sociology in various circles
of Russian society. During the five years of its existence it
graduated more than 2,000 students; reports of its work got
into the provincial, as well as the St. Petersburg press. Finally,
the many sociological organisations (student circles, associa-
tions, sections, chairs, societies, etc.) that sprang up after the
February Revolution were based on its scientific and teaching
experience.

In 1908 a private Psychoneurological Institute was founded
with the first chair of sociology, which continued the program-

353

me of the Paris School. The chair compiled courses of sociology,
and prepared four issues of the collections of articles New
Ideas in Sociology. In 1916 K. Takhtarev and Pitirim Sorokin,
who were working in the chair, organised the Kovalevsky So-
ciological Society and, in 1920, a faculty in Petrograd University.

Theorists of the most varied trends had written about the
need for direct observation, questionnaire inquiries, polls, sur-
veys, experiments, and quantitative methods in sociology,
and about the need to found institutions and institutes in which
research would be carried on by groups of scholars working
to a definite plan. ‘Such sociological laboratories,’ one socio-
logist remarked, ‘are only just being born in our time, but the
whole future of sociological science largely depends on their
success”® When the Institute of Social Psy chology, the Laboratory
of Collective Reflexology, and the Sociological Institute were
finally founded, they gathered much empirical material on
scientific organisation of labour, the social regrouping of the
population of Petrograd and changes in the ‘standard of living’
of various strata during the war and the Revolution. (Later
Sorokin’s theory of stratification, mobility, revolution, and
continuum of town and country was based on this material.).

Thus, sociological science attained a certain maturity in Rus-
sia in the early 1920s. Its criteria were a striving for theoretical
and methodological integration, development of the empirical
level of research, and institutionalisation (organisation of teach-
ing and research). A very important distinguishing feature of
it was the conviction that it schould serve the people. One
social worker had written in an early positivist manifesto
‘Our Science and Scholars’ in 1861:

real science should be democratic, without a professional caste
character serving only the authority of the powers that be. Its
purpose should not be the personal benefit of the scholars them-
selves but achievement of the human ideal and solution of social
problems; it should not be science for science’s sake, but science
for the people. Pursuit of these principles is the moral obligation
of sociology.

(The author of the manifesto called it ‘the physiology of soci-
ety’.)
But, as Marxism and the proletarian movement gathered

354

strength, the situation changed. The Revolution of 1905 de-
monstrated the whole flimsiness and class narrowness of middle-
class liberalism. The idea of sharing power with the nobility
and gentry won out in the social sciences. Capitalist sociology
was ready, in the changing circumstances, to give theoretical
help to ‘scientifically’ explaining the need for such an alliance.
The October Revolution of 1917 finally summed up this sliding
of Russian middle-class sociology into the camp of counter-
revolution. It was then that Sorokin uttered his notorious
phrase: ‘Revolution is a gloomy person’.

The deep inner crisis of Russian social studies became clear
after the October Revolution: there was no one integral theo-
retical position; a principled eclecticism swamped scholars.
Sociologists of far from similar views lost their illusions about
a socilogical science that could not forecast and explain dra-
matic events, viz. the world war of 1914 and the socialist revolu-
tion of 1917.

A new stage in the development of sociology in Russia was
linked with the names of V.I. Lenin and G. V. Plekhanov,
who laid the foundations of a Marxist sociology. Lenin’s contri-
bution was particularly significant; this science was developed
in his works both in its general theoretical and in concrete
aspects.

Lenin developed the question of the role of the subjective
factor in history in detail, defined the concept ‘class’, created
a theory of imperialism, and enriched the Marxian theory of
the state (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism; The
State and Revolution). His critique of the philosophical and
sociological conceptions of Machists and neo-Kantians (Mate-
rialism and Empirio-Criticism) is of great methodological impor-
tance. His doctrine of the two tendencies in the national ques-
tion provided the key to the decisive problems of the develop-
ment of nations in the contemporary period (‘The National
Question in Our Programme’, ‘The Working Class and the Na-
tional Question’, ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’,
etc.). His The Development of Capitalism in Russia, and his
article ‘Sociology and Statistics’, and other works are examples
of Marxian analysis of social processes.

The Revolution of 1917 opened a new page in the history
of Russian sociology, but that is the theme for a separate book.

355

|

Notes

1 V. I. Lenin. What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They
Fight the Social-Democrats, Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Progress Publish-
ers, Moscow, 1986), p 267.

2 V. Maikov. The Social Sciences in Russia. Finsky vestnik, 1846, 1.

3 K. Takhtarev. The Main Trends in the Development of Sociology.
Sovremennyi mir, 1910, 8, 10, 12.

* Russkaya musl, 1913, 3: 39.

5 M. Kovalevsky, The Fate of Sociology after 15 Years of the Twenti-
eth Century. In: Istoriya nashego vremeni (St. Petersburg, 1914); S. Yu-
zhakov. Diary of a Journalist. How to Study Sociology. Russkoye bo-
gatstvo, 1885, 11.

© V. Khvostov. Osnovy sotsiologii (The Fundamentals of Sociology)
(Moscow, 1920), p 69.

|

CONCLUSION

Igor Kon

Western sociology went through a complex evolution in the
second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth.
From a quite vague programme like, for example, Comte’s
conception, it had become one of the leading branches of so-
cial studies by the beginning of the twentieth century, with
claims to a firm position in the universities, and already occu-
pying such a position in some countries. Primitive reductionist
theories gave way to much more complicated and differentiated
conceptions. Sociology developed its own conceptual appa-
ratus. Systematic development of questions of methodology
and research techniques began. The range of problems studied
was broadened. Parallel development of general theory and em-
pirical social studies was succeeded by an orientation to their
integration, which caused an essential shift in the orientations
of both theorists and empiricists. All that promoted further
growth of professionalisation and institutionalisation, especially
from the 1920s. As for theory, non-Marxian sociology draws
inspiration today from the authors of its ‘classical’ period
like Max Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Pareto.

The relations of these authors to one another were very
complex, as we have seen. The officially unrecognised, margi-
nal Simmel, it would seem, enjoyed the greatest popularity
during his lifetime.’ His work was widely known, not only
in Germany, but also in France, the United Kingdom, Italy,
Russia, and the USA, where Small was an active propagandist
of it; in a poll of 258 American sociologists in 1927 Simmel
was second in popularity to Spencer among European sociolo-
gists.? Durkheim, while rejecting Simmel’s conception as a

357

whole, recognised the precision of his theoretical thought and
his ‘sense of the specificity of social facts’. Simmel’s influence
on his friend Max Weber was very strong; the latter saw a ple-
thora of important new theoretical ideas and exceptional pre-
cise observations in his works.* In Coser’s view

Simmel’s social ‘forms’, for example, have a great deal in common
with Weber’s ideal types. Weber’s insistence on the crucial impor-
tance of money in the emergence of rationalised economic system
owes much to Simmel’s ‘Philosophy of Money’.*

That did not, of course, exclude profound differences bet-
ween these thinkers. In 1908 Weber began an article on Simmel,
but did not finish or publish it, so as not to lessen Simmel’s
chances of getting a professorship at Heidelberg University by
his criticism (the manuscript of the article, found in his Munich
archives, was only published in the early 70s). In that article
Weber noted the unacceptability of the main principles of
Simmel’s methodology, criticising it for the ambiguity and for-
mality of the concept ‘interaction’, and for confusing subjec-
tively intentionalist and objectively significant social senses,
and for his addiction to metaphysical problems.°
There were also serious disputes in those years between

other theorists. Tonnies, for example, whose fame outside
Germany was much less than Simmel’s (his main work was
only translated into English in 1940 and into French in 1944),
was drawn into a sharp polemic with Durkheim. In a lengthy,
and on the whole positive review of Tonnies’ book in 1889,
Durkheim interpreted Gemeinschaft as an organic community,
and Gesellschaft as a mechanical one, reproaching Ténnies for
considering the second type of social organisation artificial,
and not seeing the transition from the one type to the other.

T6nnies naturally did not agree with such an interpretation of
his views, and in turn, when reviewing Durkheim’s The Divi-

sion of Labor in Society (1896), wrote that Durkeim’s whole

sociology was a modification and variant of Spencer’s, which

was also unjust.

Neither Simmel nor Tonnies, Durkheim nor Weber existed

for Pareto. A similar mutual ignoring existed between Durkheim
and Weber; Durkheim only mentioned Weber once, in a note

20

on the First German Sociological Congress. Weber, too, did
not in general name Durkheim. In the opinion of Bendix and
Roth, incidentally, Weber was not yet a notable figure in Ger-
many before 1914, and in other countries until later.’ The re-
cognised maitre of French sociology, Durkheim, was of course
better known in Europe. Although all his principal books,
including excerpts from The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life, which appeared in 1912, had been translated only in Rus-
sia during his lifetime,® his ideas had a quite broad influence
already in the early part of the century. But in the USA Durk-
heim’s popularity lagged behind that of his old opponent Tarde
right down to the 1930s; Tarde’s principal books had already
been translated into English at the turn of the century. The
American sociologists who were best known in the first quarter
of the century were Cooley, Giddings, Ross, Sumner, and
Ward.”

We must remember, when discussing the relations of sociolo-
gists at the turn of the century, and their partial ignoring of
each other, that each of them had his own group of experts
and consultants. These groups often had no direct relation with
sociology, their activity, moreover, did not cross. In Durkheim’s
circle of intellectual authorities were the historian Fustel de
Coulanges, the philosophers Emile Boutroux and Charles
Renouvier. Simmel was personally associated with the leading
cultural figures of his time; among his friends and correspon-
dents we find Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edmund
Husserl, Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, and Ernst Troeltsch.
It is impossible to understand Simmel’s works out of the con-
text of the German philosophy of the day. Tonnies counted
among his inspirers the lawyers Rudolf Ihering, Otto Gierke,
and Henry Maine, the economists Karl Rodbertus and Adolf
Wagner, the ethnologists J.J. Bachofen and Henry Lewis
Morgan, but especially Karl Marx. It is interesting that he meant
his main work for philosophers. The development of Weber’s
ideas was linked with a number of outstanding German histo-
rians (Heinrich von Sybel, Theodor Mommsen), economists
(Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies, Gustav Schmoller, Adolf Wag-
ner, Lujo Brentano, and Werner Sombart), and philosophers
(Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert).
His most important works were seen initially as economic or

359

historical. The intellectual context in which Pareto worked
was even more specific.

The various sources of ideas and intellectual orientations
naturally gave rise to different styles of sociological thinking.

But whatever complex collisions occurred between the
spokesmen of the various trends of non-Marxian sociology of
the turn of the century, the main object of their attack was
Marxism. As the English historian of sociology, John Madge,
remarked:

European scholars in the last century have been exposed to a
continuous debate with Marxism, and even when the antagonist
has not been specified, one can detect fragments of dialogue aimed
toward Marxism.'°

There are few at present who would dispute the view of the
American historian Stuart Hughes that Marx was ‘the midwife
of twentieth-century social thought’.!!

How did academic science react to the development of
Marxist sociology?

Before the 1880s and 1890s the principal method of the
bourgeois ‘critique’ of Marxism was to gloss it over. Individual
scholars, it is true, usually those who were linked somehow
with social democracy or were interested in the condition of
the working class, had read Marx earlier. Tonnies, who was
attracted to socialism in his youth, had already carefully read
Volume I of Capital, which had a big influence on him. Le
Play was acquainted with Marx and cited him, although he drew
contradictory conclusions from the same premisses; as one of
his Austrian correspondents remarked, Marx proposed to build
a new society while Le Play wanted to improve the old. But
the name of Marx was a rarity in those years among university
professors.

At the end of the last century the position changed. At the
first congress of the International Institute of Sociology in Oc-
tober 1894, Marx’s theory was already the centre of attention,
thanks to the speeches of M.M. Kovalevsky, Enrico Ferri,
F. Tonnies, P. Lilienfeld, and others. No one doubted that
historical materialism was a sociological theory; Ferri even
wholly approved of it, declaring that ‘sociology will be socialist

360

or it will not be’.1? Many sociologists of the beginning of this
century had a high opinion of Marx’s scientific contribution.
Small, for example, wrote:

Marx was one of the few really great thinkers in the history of social
science. ... I confidently predict that in the ultimate judgment of
history, Marx will have a place in social science analogous with that
of Galileo in physical science.’ ®

Respectful opinions of Marx are also to be met among his
antagonists like Weber, Durkheim, and Pareto.

The point is not formal recognition of his contribution.
There are many, very important elements in the content itself
of the conceptions of Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber, and other ma-
jor sociologists of the turn of the century that, if not borrowed
directly from historical materialism, are at least close to it,
especially when one has in mind not the answer or solution,
but the posing of problems. Neither Durkheim’s sociology of
knowledge, nor Weber’s theory of capitalism, not Tonnies’
dichotomy of the ‘commune’ and ‘society’, nor Pareto’s theory
of ideology, can be understood without allowing for that cir-
cumstance, since none of these conceptions, taken as a whole,
differed from Marx’s. But the relation of ‘academic sociology’ to
Marx’s theory was, on the whole, preconceived and unobjective.

On the one hand, Western authors (for example, Weber)
tried to prove that there was no organic link between Marx’s
theory of capitalism and his socialist programme. On the other
hand, there was a common opinion that sociology dialectically
‘removed’ socialism as such. Small and Vincent wrote in their
textbook of sociology that sociology needed to be distinguished
from socialism, and that socialism was related to sociology in
the same way as astrology to the initial stage of astronomy,
and alchemy to the sources of chemistry. Marx’s sociology,
like his socialist theory, thus belonged to the prehistory of
science.

The theoretical divergences were closely linked with the
ideological ones. Marx’s sociological theory combined an un-
derstanding of society as a system (the concept of formation,
mode of production as the foundation of the social structure,
the principle of determinism) with dialectical historism (devel-

361
24-1147

opment as a struggle of opposites, class struggle as a mode
of resolving antagonistic contradictions, etc.). When dialectics,
which was completely foreign to positivist thinking, is ‘taken
out’ of Marxism, historical materialism is converted into a
version of the eclectic ‘theory of factors’ or into vulgar ‘eco-
nomic materialism’. That is what positivist sociologists did
whose acquaintance with Marxism was for the greater part
not with the original works, but with various vulgarisations,
from which Marx, as is known, dissociated himself.

One must also take into account that many of the most
important works that brought out the dialectics of Marx’s
social philosophy (The German Ideology, the Philosophical
and Economic Manuscripts, etc.) were published only several
decades later, while Engels’s letters about historical material-
ism, in which he criticised the simplified understanding of
his and Marx’s ideas, were practically unknown outside Social-
Democratic party circles.

At the end of the nineteenth century Marxian sociological
theory became known to ‘academic’ science, hostile to it ideo-
logically, predominantly in a simplified, vulgarised form. It
was depicted as a primitive reductionist theory based on a mo-
nocausal understanding of determinism that denied the signi-
ficance of people’s conscious activity, and so on. That carica-
tured ‘Marxism’ did not, of course, stand up to any kind of se-
tious philosophical criticism. And each new ‘refutation’ consoli-
dated the negative stereotype, so that sociologists educated
in the 1920s to 1940s, with rare exceptions, knew Marxism
even worse than the preceding generation.

Real, historical Marxism had nothing in common with the
vulgar stereotype. In the works of Marx and Engels we find
a thorough description of the sociological theories of English
utilitarianism, and the traditionalist romantics, and a profound
criticism of the views of Comte, Spencer, and the naturalist
school in sociology. At the turn of the century, a critical analy-
sis of capitalist sociological theories had an increasing place
in Marxist literature. Suffice it to recall the works of: Franz
Mehring against the neo-Kantian falsification of Marxism,
against Sombart and Kathedersozialismus (academic socia]-
ism), Labriola’s polemic with Croce, and Plekhanov’s critical
analysis of the works of Rickert, Croce, Tarde, et al.

362

Lenin’s criticism of the ‘subjective sociology’ of the Russian
Narodniks demonstrated the unsoundness in general of reducing
the social to the psychological. In Materialism and Empirio-
Criticism, he brought out the fruitlessness of biologo-energetist
interpretations of society’s life, and exposed the epistemological
and social roots of the neo-Kantian and neo-positivist theories
of society. A dialogue between Marxian and non-Marxian so-
ciological theorists has become broader in recent decades,
and is having a deeper influence on the development of socio-
logical thought in the West as well as in the East.

Notes

1 Lewis A. Coser. Masters of Sociological Thought, 2nd Edition (Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1977); D. N. Levine. Introduction
to Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms (Univ. of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1971).

2 Donald N. Levine, Ellwood B. Carter, Eleanor Miller Gorman.
Simmel’s Influence on American Sociology. American Journal of Socio-
logy, 1976, 81, 4 : 841.

3 Steven Lukes. Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work (Harper & Row,
New York, 1972), p 404.

“ Marx Weber. Georg Simmel as Sociologist (Edited by D. N. Levine).
Social Research, 1972, 39, 1 : 153-163.

5 Lewis A. Coser. Op. cit., p 249.

* D.N. Levine. Art. cit.

7 Reinhard Bendix, Guenther Roth. Scholarship and Partisanship:
Essays on Max Weber (University of California Press, Berkeley, Cal.,
1971).

® In spite of censorship obstacles Russian publishers were excep-
tionally prompt in translating sociological literature, so that Russian rea-
ders were familiar at the beginning of the century with all the latest
ideological currents in Western Europe and the USA.

» D.N. Levine, E. B. Carter, E. M. Gorman. Art cit., pp 813, 840.

10 John Madge. The Origins of Scientific Sociology (Tavistock
Publications, London, 1970), pp 559-560.

11H, Stuart Hughes. Consciousness and Society (Vintage Books,
New York, 1961), p 74.

12 Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 1961, 31,2: 177.

13 Albion W. Small. Socialism in the Light of Social Science. The
American Journal of Sociology, 1912, 17, 6: 809-810.

24*

SUBJECT INDEX

A

Abstraction—19, 27, 179

Adaptation—105, 109, 110

Alienation—199, 232

Ameliorism (see Meliorism)—51

Anatomy—77

Anomie—236, 241, 251

Antagonism, capital and labour—
226, 228, 230

Anthropology—46, 47, 153

Anthroporacial school—71

Anthroposociology—73

Anti-positivism—158, 344

Apriorism—246

Association—59, 79, 216, 232

Authority—242, 251

Average man—137

B

Baden school—165, 264

Belief—216, 217

Bio-organic school—74, 78, 79

Bourgeoisie (see middle class)—
15, 17, 43, 151, 304

Bureaucracy—170, 286, 291

Cc

Capitalism—14, 16, 18, 99, 151,
152, 198, 203, 211, 228, 230,
231, 255, 257, 258, 261, 291,
296, 284, 337, 338

Capitalistic economy—292

Capitalistic mode of production—
18

Causal dependence—220, 227,
316

Census—132

Change—12, 31

Charisma—170, 289, 292, 293,
295

Chemistry—25, 155

F 4
IOs

Christianity—300
Church—243, 261
Civil society—12
Class—11, 15, 84, 86, 99, 128,
129, 147, 152, 210, 231, 313,
318, 327, 328, 347, 355
Class struggle—20, 23, 90, 151,
184, 334
Classification—24, 25, 28, 58, 164
—crimes of—133
—emotions of—320
—human relations of—180
—population of -—129
—social forms of—179, 180
—social norms of—180
Climate—62, 67, 68
Collective consciousness—29, 77,
98, 100, 212, 217, 218, 223-
25, 239, 242, 244, 248
—individual—216
Collective idea—212, 215, 217,
218
Collectivism—45, 249
Commerce—16
Communism—22, 38
Community (Gemeinschaft)—10,
175-77, 287
and society (Gesellschaft)—173,
175-77, 181, 361
Competition—23, 89, 151, 228
Conflict—82, 84, 86, 87, 90, 185,
210, 228, 229, 250
Consensus—33, 185
~—omnium-—28, 33
—universalis—207
Conservatism —3 32
Co-operation—32
Corporativism—142
Corporation—209, 228
Correlation—220
Crime—221
—crisis of capitalism—231
—economic—206, 222, 226
—moral—226
—physics—159
—political—206

—positivist model—320
~social—153, 208, 231, 233,
239, 249, 251, 321
—spirit—242

Criminality—148

Crowd (masses)—106, 107, 111,
277

Culture—57, 60, 65, 66, 69, 102,
154, 156, 161, 186, 201-03

Custom—89

D

Derivations—322-26, 333
—classification—322
Determinism—316, 319
—cultural—62
—geographical—62, 65-67, 70,
140
—mechanistic—155, 199
—social—222
—technological—68
Deutsche Gesellschaft fiir Sozio-
logie—168, 174
Development—12, 18, 28, 31, 34,
47, 57, 73, 74, 165, 180, 181,
183, 194
—linear—12, 53, 153, 154
—models of—194
—stages of—35, 36
Dialectics—54
Dialectical thinking (thought)—26
Differentiation—48-50, 52, 53,
58, 60, 65, 76, 86, 197, 230,
330
—sciences of—9, 14
Diffusion of culture—64, 154
Diffusionism—154
Disintegration—16, 241
Division of labour—10, 32, 34,
47, 50, 52, 54, 192, 197, 220,
223, 225-29, 287
Dominance—85, 192, 285, 286,
288
—charismatic—289, 290
—legal—286, 291, 292
—patriarchal—287

—traditional—287-89
—types of —285
Dynamic sociology—31, 36, 37

E

Economic exchange—261
Economics—283, 291, 296, 338
Education—208, 209, 240
Elite—327, 328, 330, 333
—circulation of 326-31
—ruling—321, 327, 328
Emotion (sentiments)—327, 333
Empirical social research—5, 9,
13, 69, 122-24, 126, 127, 132,
134, 139, 142, 144, 147, 166,
207, 357
Empiricism—19, 29, 58, 219, 246
Energetics—60
Enlightenment—179, 207, 214
Entropy—60, 61
Environmentalism—67-7 1
Equality—231
Equilibrium—32, 316, 319, 331,
333
—dynamic—317
Ethics—296
—confucian—300
—conviction of —293
—responsibility of —293, 294
Ethnocentrism—84, 90
Ethnography —47, 153, 155
Ethnology—53, 57, 154
Everyday life—218
Evolution—6, 7, 23, 53
—laws of—49
—mechanistic—59
—social—36, 47, 48, 50, 52,
58, 84, 85, 88, 89, 152, 153,
219, 316, 346
—society—31, 37, 49
—sociology of—7, 357
—stages of —154
Evolutionary theory—57, 81, 83
Evolutionism—27, 44, 47, 51, 54,
57, 79, 112, 118, 151, 155,
156, 197, 242, 312
—psychological—97, 98, 101

365

Expectation—275, 276
Exploitation—34, 84

F

Factor—28, 34, 39, 58, 62-04, 66,
69, 71, 78, 80, 82, 84-06,
88, 89, 97, 99, 101, 141, 146,
158, 177, 184, 201, 221, 223,
227, 233, 234, 237, 249, 325
—human~-—153

Family—32, 69, 75, 128, 138-41,
143

Fascism—74

Fashion—193

Fetishism—35

Feudalism—17

Folk psychology (Vélkerpsycho-
logie)—97, 103, 104

Freedom—44, 197, 231
—valuative judgments from—
259
—value from—290
—will from—-79

Freudism—103

Function—48, 52, 220
—economic—64
—social—15, 59, 230, 240, 245

Functionalism—155

G

Geographical school—61

Geography—61, 62, 66

Geometry—10, 40, 155

Geopolitics—70

Gestalt-psychology—161

Good-17, 238

Group—11, 45, 85, 87, 90, 114-
16, 177, 186, 192-94, 215,
331, 347, 348

Group psychology—105

H

Historicism—175, 342
History—7, 156, 255, 338, 349,
355

366

—sociology of —4, 7, 39, 88
Homo duplex—240
Homo oeconomicus—275
Human being, model of —275
Humanism—331

Ideal—284

Idealism—79, 217, 338

Ideal type—260-62, 264, 269,
271, 283, 294, 358

Ideas—28

Ideology—184, 186, 208, 246,
321, 323, 325, 333

Idiographic thinking -—163

Imitation—109, 112, 113, 118,
193
—theory of—195, 113, 155

Imperialism—151

Indicator—140

Individual—27, 31, 114-17, 177-
80, 224, 225, 241, 272, 275,
276, 316, 318, 326, 328, 330

Individualisation—86, 193

Individualism—15, 32, 44, 54,
100, 146, 239, 241, 267, 274,
275, 284

Inductivism—219

Industrialisation—16, 133, 281

Inequality—71, 89, 228, 229

Innovation—112

Instinctivism—97, 100-03

Instincts—33, 101-03, 116, 320,
329

Institutions—31, 34, 39, 47, 49,
53, 72, 74, 75, 78, 124, 218,
220, 330

Institutionalisation
—psychology of —96
—sociology of—5, 6, 87, 168,
169, 357

Integration—23, 32, 49, 53, 234,
242

Intellect—197

Intellectualism—198

Intellectuals—15, 347, 349, 351

Interaction—112, 114, 118, 192,
250

= _———

Interactionism—98, 114

Interest(s)—11, 33, 86, 89, 228,
239, 240, 250, 259, 316

International Institute of Sociolo-
gy—169, 207

International Sociological Asso-
ciation—5

Intuitivism—264

Irrationalism—293, 313, 320, 324

J

Jurisprudence—47, 207, 274, 276
Justice—229, 231

L

Labour (see also division of lab-
our)—69, 144, 208, 282, 283
Law—212, 273
—historical school of—174
—repressive—224
—testitutive—225
Legitimacy—276, 288, 290, 292
Liberalism—17, 44, 51, 151, 152,
200, 257, 293

M

Marxism—7, 170, 184, 185, 202,
203, 209, 249, 305, 354, 360,
362

Mass (see also Crowd)—106, 277,
327

Materialism—158, 163
—economic—257, 270, 334
—historical— 202, 360

Materialist conception of _his-
tory—19

Mathematics—10, 155

Mechanics—10

Mechanicism—53, 59, 153, 158,
312

Mechanistic school—59

Meliorism—99

Meritocracy—251

Metaphysical method of think-
ing—26

Metaphysics—19, 24, 156, 159

Methodological principles—20,
21, 161, 170, 222, 267, 270,
271, 333
—attitude—275, 277, 285

Methodology—27, 59, 76, 79, 88,
117, 139, 169, 217, 284, 287,
290, 315, 358
—telation of the natural sciences
and human studies—159, 163,
164, 264

Methods—6, 13, 26, 29, 30, 57,
59, 67, 100, 156, 157, 162,
164, 170, 179, 181, 237
—analogy—97, 105
—biographical—7
—comparative—-29, 30, 153,
221, 222
—empirical—110, 122, 126, 135
—experience—259
—experiment—29
—explanation—219, 221, 233,
242, 244, 268
—functionalist—219, 222
—historical—30, 222
—inductive—217
—intuition—162, 259
—logico-experimental—170,
314
—monographic—139, 140
—observation—29, 129, 138,
217
—objectivation—179
—positive—23
—quantitative—135, 147
—understanding—195, 196

Model of society
—evolutionist—108
—mechanistic—10
—organic—10, 48, 54
—system—19

Money—197-200, 275

Money economy—197, 198

Monism—57, 64, 217

Monotheism—35, 63

Morality—180, 208, 209, 212,
23841

367

‘Moral statistics’—143
Motivation—266, 267, 318
Motive—11

Myths—105

N

Nationalism—66, 294, 295
Naturalism—53, 54, 57, 63, 71,
152, 157, 158, 159, 163, 214,
215
Natural right—10
Natural sciences—10, 156
—and humanitarian sciences—
159, 160, 163, 264, 265
Natural selection—88
—nature of man—240
Neoevolutionism—55
Neoidealism—158
Neokantianism—157, 166
Neopositivism—100, 345
Nominalism, sociological—15, 47,
108, 115, 274
Nomothetic method (thinking)—
163
Norm—221, 318

Oo

Organicism—54, 64, 74, 75, 114.

Organisation—16, 37, 64, 68, 71,
77, 80, 100, 114

Organism—26, 30, 35, 45, 46-48,
58-60, 66, 75-7, 79, 220, 221,
225

Orthogenesis— 153

Ownership—38, 69, 230

P

Paris Sociological Society—207

Pathology (see social illness)—221

Personalism—79

Personality—114, 115, 118

Philosophy —22

history of—9, 28, 158-61, 338,
343

368

—life of—159, 190, 191, 293
—positivism of—23-05
—social—9, 43, 345
Physics—155, 156
Physiocrats—11
Physiosociology—25, 60, 122
Political arithmetic—122
Political economy—255, 256, 274
Politics—11, 37, 132, 182
Polytheism—35, 303
Population—77
Positivism—21, 22, 26, 31, 36-08,
79, 156-08, 217, 313, 330,
341-44
Possibilism—70
Poverty —126-28, 133, 148, 210
Power—33, 38, 84, 185, 285, 328,
331
Principles of Historical and Socio-
logical Study—6, 59, 86, 88,
113, 179, 197, 217, 218, 258,
263, 268, 273, 276
—causality —222
~—laissez faire-16, 33, 44, 88,
98, 152, 169
Professionalisation of sociology—
169, 357
Proletariat—24, 38, 183, 255
Prostitution —200
Protestantism—234, 282, 296
Psychoanalysis—272
Psychologism—97, 114, 117, 217,
259, 268, 340, 350
Psychology—156, 265
Public opinion—111, 113, 180

R

Racialism—70, 72

Rationalisation—197, 281, 282,
285

Rationalism—216, 293, 294, 324,
330

Rationality—179, 181, 183, 270,
281
—formal—281-84, 286, 292,
295
—material—282, 283

eee

Realism—28, 81, 83, 115, 214,
216, 342

Reason—178, 181, 319

Reductionism—86, 90, 215, 252,
319-21, 342, 343, 349

Relativism—162, 201, 222, 323

Religion—31, 35-07, 180, 208,
212, 214, 216, 224, 242-47,
295, 296, 322

Residues—319, 320, 322, 325,
329, 333

Revolution—36, 209
—bourgeois—15
—industrial—43
—physics in—155, 156
—-social—138

Romanticism—182

Russian School of
Sciences—352, 353

Social

S

Sacred and secular (profane)—242,
243

Scientism—156, 342

Self—114-17, 199

Selfishness—36, 251

Social—81, 82, 88, 90, 126

Social action—266-69, 272, 274,
276, 281, 284, 285, 317-19
~affectua!—278, 279
—classification—317
—logical—317, 318
—non-logical—-317, 318, 323,
333
—sociologism—207, 208, 215,
221, 223, 232, 243, 248, 250
—traditional—_278, 279
—types of—269
—value-oriented —27 8-80
—zweckrational (rational)—
268, 269, 271, 274, 278, 279-
81, 284

Social behaviour-11, 71, 170,
177, 236, 265, 269, 320
—deviant—236, 241

Social being—16, 324

Social coercion—211, 242

Social contract—11, 37

Social control—251

Social Darwinism—66, 67, 73, 79-
81, 83

Social ecology—62, 69

Social environment—62, 65, 70,
71, 139, 212, 216, 219, 233,
249

Social fact—19, 29, 88, 100, 160,
170, 211-13, 218, 221, 315

Social hygiene—125, 133, 142

Social information—123, 124, 135

Social illness —233

Social life—20, 26, 27, 31, 37, 38,
45, 46, 53, 63, 71, 80-02, 86,
88, 123, 133, 137, 158, 161,
162, 176, 178, 181, 185, 213,
215, 216, 225, 230, 274, 281,
325

Social morphology—77, 212

Social order—31, 33, 36, 38, 40,
180, 206, 240, 251

Social physiology—77

Social process—12, 23, 33, 34, 40,
52, 60, 83, 98

Scientific and technical (pro-
gress)—156

Social reality—268, 269, 272,
274, 283

Social relations—12, 179
—antagonistic—38
—economic—11

Social role—32, 36, 37, 114
—industrial_223
—professional—225

Social sciences—155

Social system—16, 31, 39, 49, 53,
317, 348, 349

Social technology—88

Sociolisation—86, 117

Socialism—38, 209-11, 360, 361
—scientific—20
—utopian—17, 337

Sociation, forms of—91, 244, 250

Society—9, 10, 23, 26, 37, 36,
190, 191, 208
—antagonistic—229
—and individual—48, 49, 214-
16, 225, 229, 241, 267

369

370

—and nature—30, 62, 66

—and religion—246

—as aggregate—59, 108

—as organism—48, 49, 108,
221

—as reality—83, 243

~as sui generis—28, 108, 214
—as system—10, 19, 52, 248,
316, 319

—as whole—16, 17, 31, 37, 39,
220, 267

~bourgeois—12, 151, 153,
170, 232

—capitalist_14, 20, 51, 88,
122, 251, 283

—civil—12

—class—227

—definition of—10, 76, 189,
245

—industrial— 280
—modern—225, 226, 283
—primitive—223, 244
~—traditional—267, 269, 280,
282, 283, 288

—types of—45, 47, 174, 224

Sociological theory—5, 6, 29, 31,

34, 273, 337, 340, 362
—social measurement of—61
—positive—29

Sociology—9, 14, 25, 27, 28, 39,

46, 83, 86, 100, 107, 108,
122, 153, 159-61, 166-69,
179, 186, 190, 191, 208, 209,
233, 314, 338-43, 345-54
~—and biology—45, 46, 264
-and history—30, 46, 159,
163, 164, 264, 265, 343

—and logic—325

—and other social sciences—46,
83, 118, 119, 213, 214, 273,
314

—and philosophy—213, 214
—and psychology—265, 266
—applied—162, 265, 266

—as general theory of society —
46

—bourgeois—204, 355

Comte’s definition—27

~empirical—13, 179, 252

—formal—187, 190-93, 204
—Marx—20, 342, 355
—philosophical—195, 196
—positive—23, 25
—pure—181, 191, 195
—religion—295-304
—scientific—_17, 20
—subject-matter—76, 211, 218
Socium—77
Solidarity—208, 223, 224, 226,
227, 229, 232
—organic—78, 224, 225, 228
—mechanical—224
Solipsism—62
State—31, 33, 44, 66, 99, 267,
286
Statics—23, 31, 44, 345
Statistics—10, 61, 135, 137, 138,
142, 143, 219, 234
Structural functionalism—39, 53,
248, 306, 333
Structure—10, 12, 19, 31, 34, 39,
53,77, 79
Struggle for existence—88-90
Subjectivism —338, 343
Submission—86, 192
Suicide—222, 232-37
classification —235
System approach—55

T

Technology—112
—scientific research of—7, 127,
147

Theology —24

Totemism—208, 242

U

Understanding—160, 264-66, 268-
70, 273, 280, 297

Urbanisation—16

Utilitarianism —108

Utopia—38

— — -_+-—_———“—e OC

Vv

Value-relevance—165, 259
Values—196, 227, 238, 260, 281
Volk spirit—104
Voluntarism—28, 58

WwW

Way of life—69

Wealth—15, 211

Will-175, 177-81, 185

World Sociological Congress—5

NAME INDEX

A

Abrams, Philip—131, 149, 172
Adorno, Theodore—203, 306
Alexander IT—341

Alexander the Great—289
Alpert, Harry—252

Ammon, Otto—73, 93
Aronson, Elliot—120

Ashton, Thomas S.—148

B

Bachofen, Johann J.-175, 359

Bacon, Francis—219

Bagehot, Walter—82, 83, 94

Baldwin, James M.-107, 112,
114,119

Barnes, Harry Elmer—8

Barth, Paul—249

Bastian, Adolf—189

Baumgarten, Eduard—309, 311

Bebel, August—20

Becker, Howard—8

Bekhterev, Vladimir—60, 107,
350

Bell, Daniel— 251

Bendix, Reinhard—172, 308, 359,
363

Bentham, Jeremy—17, 44

Bergson, Henri—159

Bernard, Lister L.—103, 120, 169

Bernard, Luther—54

Bessner, Wolfgang—310

Bismarck, Otto von—144

Boas, Franz—112, 154, 155

Bogardus, Emory—332

Bogdanov, Alexander—348

Bonald, Louis de—15, 141, 214
Booth, Charles—127-31, 147, 148
Borkenau, Franz—332, 336
Bougle, Célestin—207, 217, 253
Boutroux, Emile—359

Bowley, Arthur L.—131, 149
Brentano, Lujo—359

Bryce, James—167

Buber, Martin—359

Buckle, Henry T.—39, 63, 64, 92
Buddha—289

Buffon, Georges de—13, 14
Bulgakov, Sergius—347
Burckhardt, Jacob—152, 153,171
Burke, Edmund—15

Cc

Caesar—289

Carey, Henry C.-—59, 61

Carter, Ellwood B.—56, 172, 363

Cassirer, Ernst—298, 310, 311

Cavalli, Luciano—8

Chamberlain, Houston S.—72, 73,
93

Chizhevsky, A.L.—69, 93

Clark, Terry Nichols—8

Cleon—290

Colbert, Jean-Baptiste—132

Cole, Stephen—148

Comte, Auguste—22-42, 45, 46,
49, 53, 75, 83, 96, 108, 147,
157, 161, 167, 207, 214, 219,
221, 223, 232, 253, 314, 342,

343, 357, 362
Condorcet, Jean A.—23, 27, 132,
207

Cooley, Charles H.—54, 56, 115-
19, 121, 162, 359

Coser, Lewis A.—8, 39, 42, 121,
188, 308, 332, 336, 358, 363

Cournot, Antoine A.—108

Cousin, Victor—63

Cresson, André—27, 41

Croce, Benedetto—264, 362

D

D’Alembert, Jean M.—132
Danilevsky, Nikolai-153, 344,
347, 350

Dante, Alighieri-199

Darlington, C. D.—95

Darwin, Charles—18, 44, 57, 58,
62, 81, 82, 332

Davy, Georges—207, 252

Dealey, James Q.—98

de Greef, Guillaume—94, 353

de Roberty, Eugene—207, 252,
343-46, 350, 352

Demolins, Edmond—68, 69, 140

Dilthey, Wilhelm—159, 160-63,
165, 171, 190, 258, 259, 264,
265, 349, 559

Dion, Michel—251, 254

Dreiser, Theodore—52

Dreyfus, Alfred—52, 313

Durkheim, Emile—39, 54, 80, 108,
113, 121, 124, 144, 148, 155,
167, 169, 170, 187, 206-54,
267, 298, 305, 306, 332, 342,
350, 357-59, 361, 363

E

Eisermann, Gottfried—336

Elesh, David—148

Ellwood, Charles—119

Engel, Emst—143

Engels, Frederick—18, 19, 20, 21,
121, 126, 210, 309, 326, 335,
362

Espinas, Alfred—79, 94, 252

F
Fauconnet, Paul—207

te y

Febvre, Lucien—92

Fenton, Steve—254

Ferguson, Adam—11

Ferrarotti, Franco—8

Ferri, Enrico—108, 312, 360

Fouillée, Alfred—39, 79, 94, 353

Fourier, Charles—17

Frank, Simon L.—344, 345

Frazer, James—242, 298

Freud, Sigmund—95, 102, 270,
323

Freyer, Hans—264, 307

Frobenius, Leo—154

Fustel de Coulanges, Numa-De-
nis—359

G

Galileo Galilei-282, 361

Galton, Francis—127

Garofalo, Raffaele—108

Gehlen, Arnold—203

Genghis Khan—290

Gerth, Hans—308

Giddens, Anthony—8, 252, 254

Giddings, Franklin—80, 98-101,
120, 168, 169, 350, 359

Gierke, Otto von—359

Glazer, Nathan—251

Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur—72, 73

Goethe, Johann W.-161

Goldfrank, Walter—149

Gorman, Eleanor—56, 172, 363

Gouldner, Alvin—306

Graebner, Fritz—154

Granet, Marcel—207

Graunt, John—13

Guerry, André-Michel—134, 143

Gumplowicz, Ludwing—83, 87,
94, 168, 169, 350

H

Habermas, Jiirgen—306, 311
Haeckel, Ernst H.—75
Halbwachs, Maurice—207
Halley, Edmund—13
Harvey, David—93
Haushofer, Karl—66, 92

Hegel, Georg—12, 39, 74, 103

Helvetius, Claude A.—11, 16

Henderson, Lawrence J.—332,
333

Herbart, Johann F.—104

Herder, Johann—161

Heyden, Giinter—92

Hill, James J.—52

Hitler, Adolf—290

Hobbes, Thomas—11, 44, 90,
101, 173, 175, 178, 179, 303

Hobhouse, Leonard—167

Hofstadter, Richard—54-56, 89,
95

Holbach, Paul Henri—11, 16

Hollitscher, Walter—95

Horkheimer, Max—203, 306

Hoult, Thomas F.—171

House, Floyd~332

Hughes, H. Stuart—158, 171, 360,
363

Humboldt, Alexander—64

Hume, David—11, 44, 96

Hummett, Jan—254

Huntington, Ellsworth-—67, 68,
92

Huntington, Samuel—251

Husserl, Edmund—159, 165, 298,
359

Huxley, Thomas—27, 80

ibn-Khaldun—68
Ihering, Rudolf—359
Isaiah—302

Izoulet, Jean—252

J

Jacob, Francois—-95

James, William—103, 114, 121,
332

Jaures, Jean—209

Jesus— 289, 290

Juquelier, P.—108, 120

K

Kant, Immanuel—44, 159, 189,

198, 200, 207, 239, 303

Kareev, Nicholas—338, 340, 343,
345, 347, 349, 352

Karsavin, Leo—344

Kautsky, Karl—20, 210

Kay-Shuttleworth, James—125

Kedrov, B. M.—41

Kellermann, Paul—42

Khvostov, V.—345, 356

King, Gregory—13

Kistyakovsky, B.—347

Kjellén, Rudolf—66, 92

Kluckhohn, Clyde—332

Knies, Karl—-256, 294, 359

Koenig, R.—185

Kon, I. S.—8, 42, 171

Korkunov, Nicholas—344

Kovalevsky, Maxim-—169, 207,
338, 343-46, 350, 352, 353
356, 360

Kroeber, Alfred—69

L

Labriola, Antonio—20, 210, 254,
362

Lafitau, Joseph—14

Lagrange, Jouis—23

Laplace, Pierre S. de—13, 132

Lappo-Danilevsky, Alexander—
342

Lassalle, Ferdinand—210

Lavoisier, Antonie Laurent—13

Lavrov, Peter—349

Lazarsfeld, Paul F.—138, 150

Lazarus, Moritz—104

Le Bon, Gustave—106-108, 119,
120, 244, 277, 305

Lécuier, Bernard—8, 21, 148, 149

Le Dantec, Felix—27

Leibnitz, Gottfried—173

Lenin, V. 1-7, 18, 20, 21, 53,
55, 91, 155, 337, 355, 356

Leontiev, Constantine—344

Le Play, Frédéric—69, 128, 138-
141, 143, 149, 167, 206, 360

Levenstein, Adolf—146, 147, 150

Levine, Donald N.—56, 172, 363

373

Levy-Bruhl, Lucien—209, 298,
353

Lexis, Wilhelm—144, 149

Lilienfeld, Paul—76, 78, 83, 169,
343, 360

Lindsey, Gardner—120

Lipset, Seymour—251

Locke, John—11, 44, 96,175, 179

Lombroso, Cesare—39, 69, 108,
312

London, Jack—52

Lorenz, H. A.—95

Léwith, Karl—284, 309

Lukes, Steven—252, 363

Luther, Martin—113

Lycurgus—289

M

Machiavelli, Nicolo—303, 332

Madge, John—8, 360, 363

Maikov, Valerian—338-40, 356

Maine, Sir Henry—175, 359

Maistre, Joseph de—15, 214

Malthus, Thomas—13, 44

Marcuse, Herbert—306

Martindale, Don A.—8

Martineau, Harriet—40

Marvin, F. S.—42

Marx, Karl—18-21, 95, 121, 151,
171, 173, 184, 202, 209, 210,
229, 248, 249, 252, 275, 282,
283, 296, 304, 305, 309, 325,
326, 332, 334, 335, 342, 359

Maurice, Allais—336

Maus, Heinz—7

Mauss, Marcel— 207, 209

Mayer, Carl—294

Mayer, Hugo—294

McDougall, William—101-03

Mead, George H.—117, 118, 121

Mechnikoy, L. I.—70, 93

Mehring, Franz—362

Menger, Karl—175

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice—310

Merton, Robert—237, 332

Meyer, Hugo—93

Michels, Robert--312

374

Mikhailovsky, Nicholas—107, 112,
120, 340, 349

Milgram, Stanley--120

Mill, James—17

Mill, John S.—96, 108, 119, 157,
161, 165, 219, 220, 314

Mills, C. Wright—308

Mitzman, Arthur—8, 295, 310

Mohammed—289

Mommsen, Theodor—359

Mommsen, Wolfgang—J.—189,
295, 308, 310

Monge, Gaspard—23

Montesquieu, Charles—23, 108,
207

Morgan, Lewis H.—175, 359

Mosca, Gaetano —312, 313

Mougeolle, Pierre—68, 93

Moynihan, Daniel—251

Miiller, Hans-Peter—252, 254

Miller, Johannes—75

Miller, Max—63, 243

Miintzer—113

N

Napoleon Bonaparte—22, 289,
290

Napoleon III—-141

Nietzsche, Friedrich W.—101, 106,
152, 153, 171, 173, 190, 270,
302, 303

Nisbeth, Robert A.—8, 251

Novgorodtsev, Paul—342

Novicow, Jacques—78, 207, 352

oO

Oberschall, Anthony R.—8, 21,
143, 148-50, 167, 168, 172

Obolensky, L.—344

Ostwald, Wilhelm—60, 92

Owen, Robert—17

P
Pantaleoni, Matteo—312

Parent-Duchatelet, Alexis J.-133,
134

Pareto, Vilfredo—60, 169, 170,
248, 306, 312-36, 357, 358,
360

Park, Robert E.—168

Parsons, Talcott—8, 39, 54-56,
171, 266, 308, 309, 332, 333,
336

Pavlov, Ivan—350

Pericles—290

Perrin, Robert G.—52

Petty, William—13

Plekhanov, Georgi—20, 166, 172,
355, 362

Plessner, Helmuth—203

Poggi, Gianfranco—8

Poincaré, Henri—169

Pope, Whitney—254

Proudhon, Pierre J.—210

Q

Quételet, Adolphe—25, 69, 126,
134-138, 140, 14244, 149,
342

R

Ranke, Leopold von—262

Ratzel, Friedrich—65-67, 92

Ratzenhofer, Gustav—86, 94

Reclus, Elisée—70, 93

Reiner, Robert—254

Renan, Ernest—39, 63

Renouvier, Charles—359

Retzius, Anders J.—73

Ribot, T.A. -101

Ricardo, David—256

Rickert, Heinrich—164-66, 171,
172, 259-63, 359, 362

Rilke, Rainer Maria—359

Ritter, Karl—64, 65, 92

Rockefeller, John D.—52

Rodbertus, J. Karl—359

Rodin, Auguste—359

Roscher, Wilhelm—256, 294, 359

Ross, Edward A.—112, 119, 121,
359

Roth, Guenther—172, 308, 359,
363

Rothacker, Erich—203

Rousseau, Jean Jacques—11, 297
Rowntree, B. Seebohm—131, 149
Runett-Hurst, A. R.-149

)

Saint-Simon, Claude de-17, 20°
23, 40, 41, 207, 209, 210,
214, 252

Savigny, Friedrich von—174, 175

Schaffle, Albert—76, 77, 94, 169

Scheler, Max—203, 310

Schelling, Friedrich von—74-75

Schlanger, Judith E.—94

Schluchter, Wolfgang—306, 311

Schmidt, Gert—306, 311

Schmoller, Gustav von—142, 144,
169, 175, 256, 359

Schnapper-Arndt, Gottlieb—145,
149

Schopenhauer, Arthur—153

Schweitzer, Albert—359

Sechenov, I. M.—27

Seligman, Ben B.—307, 335

Semple, Ellen C.—67, 92

Seyfarth, Constans—306, 311

Shils, Edward—172

Sighele, Scipio—106

Simiand, Francois—207, 209

Simmel, Georg—56, 112, 161,
162, 169, 172, 187, 189-205,
340, 342, 347, 350, 357, 363

Sinclair, John—124, 125

Small, Albion W.—87, 88, 94, 95,
168-70, 357, 361, 363

Smith, Adam—11, 44, 117, 256

Smith, Robertson—242

Solon—289

Sombart, Werner—94, 203, 257,
359, 362

Sorel, Georges—313

Sorokin, Pitirim—141, 162, 298,
343-45, 347, 348, 350, 352,
354, 355

Spencer, Herbert—27, 43-56, 58,
59, 75, 76, 81, 83, 88, 98, 99,
108, 147, 161, 169, 173,
223, 253, 314, 342, 350, 357,
358, 362

375

Spengler, Oswald—203, 350
Spinoza, Baruch—173, 175, 177
Spranger, Eduard~161
Sprondel, Walter M.—311
Stammler, Rudolf—203
Steinthal, Heymann—104, 189
Stern, William—161
Steward, John A.—93
Stirner, Max—101
Struve, Peter B.—55, 350
Sumner, William G.—54, 84, 88-
90, 95, 168, 169, 332, 359
Sybel, Heinrich von—359
Szczurkiewicz, Tadeusz—94

T

Taine, Hippolyte A.—27, 39, 63,
106, 157, 171

Takhtarev, K.—344, 354, 356

Tarde, Gabriel de—80, 82, 107,
108, 112, 114, 119, 120, 169,
207, 350, 353, 359, 362

Tatham, George—93

Taylor, Edward—243

Thierry, Augustin—11

Thomas, William—89

Timasheff, Nicholas S.—8, 95,
120

Toch, Hans—120

Ténnies, Ferdinand—142, 144,
148, 168-70, 172-88, 190,
223, 253, 310, 350, 358

Tourville, Henri de—69, 140

Toynbee, Arnold—350

Troeltsch, Ernst—203, 359

Trotter, Wilfred—102, 120

Tugan-Baranovsky, Mikhail—350

Turgot, Jacques—132, 161

Tylor, Edward B.—58, 298

Vv

Vaccaro, Michele Angelo—81, 94

Vacher de Lapouge, Georges—73,
93

Vacherot, Etienne—39

Vallaux, Camitle—68, 93

Van den Berghe, Pierre L.—95

Vauben, Sebastien—132

376

Vayda, Andrew P.—93

Vica, Giovanni Battista—12
Vidal de la Blanche, Paul—70, 93
Vierkandt, Alfred—187
Vigouroux, A.—107, 120
Villermé, Louis—133

Vincent, George—168, 361
Virchow, Rudolf—142

Volney, Francois de—14

WwW

Wagner, Adolph—143, 144, 149,
359

Wallace, Alfred—80

Walras, Leon—312, 313, 316

Walter, A.—262, 307

Wallas, Graham—102, 120

Ward, Lester F.—80, 98, 99, 120,
168, 350, 359

Warntz, William—93

Webb, Beatrice—149

Webb, Sidney—131, 149

Weber, Alfred—144

Weber, Max—142, 144-48, 150, 162,
163, 166, 169, 170, 172, 177,
187, 203, 248, 252, 255-311,
349, 350, 357-59, 361, 363

Wiese, Leopold von—187

Wilson, Edward O0.-—95

Winckelmann, Johannes F.—308

Windelband, Wilhelm—163, 171,
359

Wipper, Robert—347

Wolff, Kurt H.—252

Woltmann, Ludwig—74

Worms, René—78, 94, 169, 207

Woyslawski, Hersch-Leib—203

Wundt, Wilhelm—97, 104, 113.
120, 169, 188, 207

Y
Yuzhakov, Sergius—350, 356
Zz
Zeitlin, Irving M.—21

Zeller, Eduard—189
Znaniecki, Florian—162

ET

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STUDENT'S LIBRARY

This is a study of the shaping and development of sociology in
Western Europe, the United States, and Russia at the turn of the century,
a period particularly important for the establishing of sociology as an
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Yather vague programme it was, for example, in the conceptions of
Auguste Comte, into a leading social science at the beginning of the
twentieth century. They trace how it developed its conceptual apparatus,
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logy and techniques of research.

The contribution to sociology of the great spokesmen of its classical
period, like Ténnoes, Simmel, Durkheim, Max Weber, and Pareto, are

aro
of Classical
Sociol

1

ISBN 5--61.101102—5